Bad review? Yes, please!

How can an Italian restaurant as much attention as possible in the shortest amount of time? Simple: ask all your customers to write the worst reviews imaginable about your restaurant on Yelp’s website.

So you had a great, or an awful, dinner somewhere? Post a review on Yelp by rating it with 1 to 5 stars. It’ll help other customers by narrowing down the tremendous range of local restaurants, allowing them to make an informed choice. The only problem is Yelp’s somewhat shady way of dealing with the reviews.

Nobody knows this better than Davide Cerretini, owner of San Francisco’s Botto Bistro. For days and days, the restaurateur was called by Yelp and asked whether he’d like to advertise on their site. Yelp was rather persistent in their efforts to solicit Cerretini’s participation, and he finally gave in – just to get them off his back. A short while later, he wanted to stop using the site and that’s when the blackmail began. In order to ‘punish’ the Italian bistro, the reviews became progressively worse and the positive reviews disappeared from the site – a complaint that has surfaced about Yelp before.

Cerretini plotted his counterattack. Under the clever name of ‘Hate us on Yelp’, he started a campaign aimed at gathering as many 1 star reviews as possible. Customers received a 25% discount on pizzas if they promised to give the restaurant a bad review.