| No, GetSatisfaction is different. The business model of Yelp or Zaggats is to sell ad space or books or whatnot. The business model of GetSatisfaction is to get companies to pay them so that the company can take down negative information about itself. With Yelp, there is no option for a business to pay them $100 per month so that you can take down bad reviews of your restaurant. That's a fundamental difference. GetSatisfaction has a desire to get users writing things on their site so that the company their writing about gets over a barrel where they have to pay them "protection money" to remove bad things people complain about their service. And $100 isn't much for the ability to silence a bunch of people bad-mouthing your service. GetSatisfaction's wording has even tried to push the point using phrasing like "X is not yet participating" and "X has not yet committed to open conversation about its products and services" (which used to be their tagline). They both try to make it sound like they've approached X and X has declined to participate. That's different from a review site where users can say what they want, but there's no claim that the place being reviewed has declined to participate. If you allow users to post negative things about a business, fine. If you allow users to post negative things about a business and then go to that business and ask them for $100/mo to silence those negative things, not fine. If you allow companies to participate in the conversation and say, "we have no affiliation with X" for the companies who have nothing to do with your forum, fine. If you make it sound like the company is trying to avoid your forum because they're scared of the truth, not fine. The devil's in the details. Here, HelpHive is trying to put themselves in a position where users have their number for places of business rather than that place of business' number. In the future, there's nothing to stop them from adding ads for competitors (and offering to connect the caller to that competitor) or worse, if they're really successful and become an online directory that a lot use, holding customers for ransom. What it comes down to is truth. GetSatisfaction is obscuring the truth by allowing companies to moderate for a price and by using misleading language about the companies who aren't paying them. HelpHive is obscuring the truth by telling customers that their number is the number of the business they want to call. People don't get uppity about Yelp or Zaggats because, while a user can post an untrue review or a reviewer might have just seen a bad night, it's a lot closer to the truth and a lot more fair. If you're getting a massive amount of bad reviews on Yelp, that's not good for you, but at least Yelp isn't coming along to extort $100 out of you to get rid of those bad reviews. |