Billion Dollar Bully is a documentary film about Yelp that “examines the claims by business owners of extortion, review manipulation and review fabrication.”
That is the description posted on the filmmakers’s Kickstarter page, through which they are trying to raise the funds needed to finish the film.
We have discussed the ways in which Yelp and similar review sites can imperil your business’s reputation, and we’ve had quite a bit to say about how to protect against that possibility (essentially, through online reputation management). But Yelp can also be an extraordinary tool for a young business. Yelp is among the highest-ranked websites by search engines. So by creating a Yelp profile, a business immediately has a prominent presence online.
Yelp is an important component of online reputation management. That doesn’t mean it is immune to experiencing a reputation crisis itself: Shares of Yelp’s stock fell 4.7% after the release of the documentary’s trailer.