This is where the controversy comes in. Let's talk about Yelp! This is a site that was started in 2004, and is extremely popular in the S.F. Bay Area. (It actually covers most U.S. metropolitan areas, but I am only familiar with the Bay Area reviews). Honig got it's first review in July of 2006: a five star rating and a wonderful recommendation from Shawn S. who says, "this is my favorite winery ever," among other flattering comments. How cool is that? Unsolicited praise, that is out there for everyone to see? You can't beat that!

Honig has been around for 30+ years. We do not advertise, aside from our annual postcard campaign, and that goes out to people who have signed up for our mailing list. We have always relied heavily on word-of-mouth to get people here, and to promote our wines, and it has worked very well for us. So now, here's one more way for us to get the word out. It's a no brainer. I am signed up to receive an email notification every time someone writes a review on Yelp! about Honig. I even have the opportunity to email the reviewer back to thank them for the review.

From a marketing point of view, I love this, not just because I get to read about what we are doing right, but I also get to know if we do something wrong. And that is huge. We all know that an unhappy customer will tell more people about their experience than a happy customer. It sucks, but it's true. A happy customer will tell 10 of their friends about their great experience, while someone who had an issue will tell anyone who will listen. Unfortunately, they usually don't tell us. So we go merrily along, not realizing that we have done something that has made someone unhappy. If we don't know about it, we can't fix it.

That's where Yelp! comes in. So far we have had 47 reviews on Yelp! Out of those 47 reviews, 36 have been five star reviews, giving us an overall 4.5 star rating. Not bad! But why, you ask, do we have a 4.5 star rating, instead of a 5 star rating? Don't we want to be perfect? Of course we do. But in the real world, no one is perfect. There is going to be the occasional visitor that is not perfectly happy with their experience. Thanks to sites like Yelp!, they can now share that information with us.

This is not to say that every review that is written on Yelp! (or similar sites) is accurate, or unbiased. Maybe the customer was just having a bad day. I've heard horror stories about businesses that were negatively impacted by a bad review. They want sites like Yelp! shut down and don't feel that the general public should have a resource that allows them to broadcast their opinion and possibly cause a business to lose customers. While the idea that this can happen is really scary, I would rather be made aware of any issues, and have the opportunity to correct any problems that are brought to my attention. Ignoring bad experiences doesn't make them go away. In my opinion the benefits of having first-hand information from a customer, good or bad, is worth the risk.