"Yanked by Yelp": When Social Media Goes Bad

In retrospect it seems inevitable: email spawned spam; search engines engendered "black hat" SEO, now it's time for Spam 2.0, when spam enters the domain of user-generated content. An article last week in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story: a network of mutual back-scratchers--primarily small businesses--exchanged favorable reviews on the locally powerful Yelp review site. When Yelp discovered the spam scam it deleted most of the offenders' reviews, prompting outrage and talk of a class-action lawsuit from those "yanked by Yelp."

Yelp defends the decision as vital to protecting the integrity of the brand, much as major search engines must be diligent about demoting or purging irrelevant or falsely inflated links. Companies hosting email and search services spend significant resources trying (not entirely successfully) to purge spam. The Yelp case gives notice to Web 2.0 businesses that it's their turn now to mount big cleanup efforts. Chances are that, as with other forms of spam, Spam 2.0 will remain a fixture on these sites for the foreseeable future. Spammers will get smarter and the effort required to keep them at bay will only increase. Over the longer term, Spam 2.0 will be a bigger problem for social media than current headaches such as inappropriate content or language.

Perversely, the rise of Spam 2.0 is a positive indicator for Web 2.0. Spam only afflicts the largest and most successful web apps with the greatest commercial potential: email, search...you see the pattern. The rise of social spam is a strong rebuttal to doubts about the popularity, credibility, sustainability, growth prospects, and revenue opportunities of community-oriented Web 2.0 models.

Yelp took the right approach: they acknowledged companies' need for a role in the conversation and started Yelp for Business Owners, which encourages owners to "claim" their businesses on the site, communicate openly through a structured channel, and use customer comments to improve operations instead of being too quick to refute negative information. The good guys will be glad for the opportunity; but Spam 2.0 is probably here to stay.