The Deets on Yelp Elites

To be one of the in crowd. To hang with the coolest people. To live in luxury, even if only for a moment. These are things many of us dream of. They’re also things that Yelp Elites call reality.

Yelp Elite? Help Me Out Here

Well, helping out your fellow man/woman/child is the name of the game for a member of the Yelp Elite Squad, and though yours truly bears no badge, I’ll do my best to explain in common-folk terms what the Elites are and what it takes to become one.

Like Google and Amazon, Yelp knows that reviews have power, because they are - in the best of times - the pure and honest voices of real people, putting to words their feelings and experiences so that others might learn from them. This helps the businesses and companies being reviewed, and it helps the review aggregators by making them a trusted source for user-generated data. It doesn’t hurt that it also drives traffic through their sites.

But while Google and Amazon are both selling something (or many, many things), Yelp doesn’t. The product that Yelp offers is quality reviews for the benefit of users and business owners, and so it pays to have the best, most refined reviews on the internet. That’s where Yelp Elite comes in.

Sure, Google has Local Guides and Amazon has Top Reviewers (and countless other sites have countless other designations - those are topics for another day) but Yelp’s Elite Squad program is just as distinctive as Yelp itself.

Yelp Elite is a distinction only an ardent user of Yelp will attain. A few low hurdles separate the wheat from the chaff- only users over 21 are eligible (or of legal drinking age in your region), and only members who use their real names and submit a real and clear picture of themselves for their profiles. After all, if a user can’t be honest in their profile alone, the very first thing they set up, how is anyone supposed to take them at their word after that?

Assuming a user clears those early bars, then the process to Elite is as simple as one might guess, in theory. Less so in execution. You write a lot of reviews. Detailed reviews are the best, ones that include wait times, server names, specific dishes or drinks that stood out, or funny anecdotes about your experience. The more readable and memorable your review, the more impact it will have on fellow readers and those who’ll later examine your body of work for Elite quality.

After even more reviews, more time spent posting pictures, checking in to restaurants, and interacting with the greater Yelp community (on and off-screen), you can be nominated for Elite status. You can submit yourself, or another reviewer can nominate you if they think you deserve that recognition.

And if approved, you will join the Yelp Elite Squad for… just that calendar year. Every year a new batch of Elites are nominated and selected. Granted, if you’ve been approved one year, your body of work should make you an appealing target in the next year. Just know that it is not get it and forget it, you have to keep putting in the work.

And what do you get for all that work?

The Sweet Smell of Free Food

As a Yelp Elite, you will be invited to area restaurants and other gathering places where you will not only sample fine food, but enjoy the company of other Yelp Elites like yourselves. The diverse mix of people is unexpected I’m told. While you could be forgiven for thinking that people who write a lot of reviews must be lazy and boring, many Elites are in fact professionals who are well-traveled, well-rounded, and well-adjusted to social life. Foodies, writers, bloggers, and businesspeople make up the mix, and mingling with them makes the food and drink even sweeter.

But like any commitment, being an Elite can be draining and there are aspects that, while you might have loved the whole thing at first, you really wish they’d just change this one thing!

Behind the Curtain

In our most recent episode (at time of writing, RPDC 21: Craig-san: Reloaded), we had the pleasure of welcoming Craig S. onto the show, a 3-time Elite Squad member, and writer of many a fine review.

Craig’s full insights are worth the listen in the episode, so you’d be doing yourself a favor to listen in. But I’ll summarize here.

In our interview, Craig told us that he’d decided to take a step away from Yelp. While a pandemic can certainly hamper the industry, there were other reasons he had for lowering his engagement with the platform.

One reason is the mindset that a semi-professional reviewer is forced to adopt whenever they go out to eat. Instead of relaxing or treating yourself to a nice night, you’re mentally making notes of how you were greeted, how the ambience feels, the noise level, the temperature of the food; you note every detail that you might want to include in a review, and that’s what the experience becomes centered around.

For an actor who has been backstage, or better yet, knows the script of a play they are watching, some of the magic of theatre is lost. They see the play, but they also see the technical aspects, the costume and set choices, they hear the cadence and delivery and are counting the beats instead of feeling them. The experience is centered around more than just the plot and the performances.

Can they still enjoy it? Yes, absolutely. But there is no penalty for the play-watching actor who zones out and fails to pay attention. The Elite reviewer who fails to capitalize on a trip out may feel pressure to go out again to get a good review. And that’s no way to enjoy oneself.

Another issue Craig revealed is that he believes Yelp is holding itself back from being one of the most important websites on the internet for product reviews. That, with the population of dedicated reviewers, Yelp’s coders are not taking full advantage of the resource they themselves have created. And when you see potential continually being unmet, when you see someone or something (or someYelp) settling on “good enough” time and time again, your motivation to support that thing wanes. So you move on.

And that’s what Craig has done. He still writes reviews because he truly enjoys it, and he does it for all the right reasons. He loves to travel and see new places, new perspectives. He enjoys entertaining and informing his fellow internet-dwelling citizens. And he’s always on the lookout for the places with free refills on melon soda.

Talking with Craig was an eye-opening experience on many levels. For more Yelp tips as well as juicy bits of wisdom, listen to the full interview here.