Practicum Post #1

I've been working on my practicum project and decided it was time to share some of my work with all of you. I was assigned to the social review sites topic and chose to focus my project on yelp.com. The site's tagline is "Real reviews. Real people." Well, I decided it was time to become one of these "real" reviewers and I created a profile on the site.

It was relatively easy to make a profile on Yelp, but I was a little taken aback by the amount of information I was prompted to include in my profile. In addition to basic geographical and personal information, Yelp asks new users to include personal preferences and "likes" - think of the information people tend to include in the "About Me" section of Facebook profiles. I'm not sure why my co-reviewers would put a ton of stock in my favorite movie, personal nicknames, or "secrets" about me, but I decided to fill in a number of these sections for the sake of posterity. If anything, it's apparent that Yelp wants to come off as a fun, casual environment where users can really express themselves.

Really, Yelp? Why?

I was also prompted to link my Yelp account to my other social media accounts at several points in the profile creation process. I wasn't comfortable giving Yelp access to my Facebook and chose to bypass that part of the registration process... perhaps I'll reconsider later on. I did, however, link my Yelp account to my Twitter handle (@kimvosburg). The site showed me how they post short snippets of user reviews to their Twitter feeds once reviews are posted to Yelp - I didn't have an issue with this and decided to okay that function.

After all of that business, I wrote two reviews - one for Greenbush Bakery and another for the Big Ten Pub on Regent Street.

Dipping my toe into the social review pond

These are places in Madison that I know and love - not places I visited for the first time and decided to review. It took me a little while to write these reviews because I felt a little pressure to write at the level of experienced/frequent Yelp users. Consequently, I tried to say clever, interesting, and meaningful things about the food and service at these Madison establishments - I don't find reviews that read something like "Oh my god, this place is SO good! You should totally go!!" particularly useful, so I'm trying to avoid that in my own reviews. I'm looking forward to reviewing more restaurants, stores, and more in the weeks to come.