Yesterday, some family, friends, and I ventured from Waterloo to Toronto to participate in theYelp CMYE: Toronto Cupcake Crawl. It was a gluttonous, sugar-coma-inducing day wherein we sampled cupcakes from a dozen local and independent downtown vendors.
I was most impressed by the level of sophisication inYelp's community management. Kat, the Toronto-area Community Manager fit the role perfectly: outgoing, engaging, welcoming, and knows her food. Kat is actually employed by Yelp and, that got me thinking, how does Yelp-corporate justify paying her?
Seeding Content
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm betting that some quant-jock-analyst at Yelp recognized that they were seeing a disproportionate number of searches for 'cupcakes' in toronto. Google Trends is showing that 'muffin' search volumes have been steady-to-decling, whereas 'cupcakes' have been steadily increasing to the point where 'cupcake' search volumes are at par with 'muffin' searches.
Ultimately, Yelp wants to drive users to their site and get them engaged to drive page views and, therefore, ad revenue. Having high-quality, trust-worthy, recent, relevant content is an engagement-driver. At time of writing, the cupcake crawl has 10 reviews totalling ~350
0 words.
As an aside, I was amazed at the role of mobile computing played in creating this content. Several people were Tweeting, but more interesting, people were shooting and posting images of their cupcakes in real-time using their iPhones. A lesson-learned for UGC-reliant sites -mobility lowers the barrier-to-contribution for your site.
Converting Weak Ties to Strong Ties
When I was at Livemocha, no tangible benefit occurred to me to introduce our community members at face-to-face events. After observing the Yelp community in action, it's clear:
- Members that engage face-to-face are your most dedicated customers
- Your most dedicated customers are most engaged
- Your most engaged members contribute content (this is, by far, a minority, of your users)
Converting the weak ties of users that know each other only as avatars and nicknames to strong ties (friendships) means your highly-engaged users return to your site to be with their friends, and these friendships make more effective/ relevant the other engagement mechanisms in place (point systems, for example).In conclusion, for those that care, Babycakes was the best-of-show (but, truthfully, I'm more of a cookie-man).
