Yelp Expansion Plans
Mike Boland writes today about Yelp, including…
The company is moving in some interesting directions and the $15 million it just received will provide the fuel. Much of it will be put towards sales & marketing to seed reviews activity and bring in SMB advertisers. Its 10 person sales office in New York City is the first such move and will be staffed with new and existing inside sales reps.
To clarify a point made in the last post, most of the company’s efforts to generate new reviews involve moving into new cites, rather than into new categories. Categories, according to Stoppleman, have to happen naturally and the company takes a hands off approach when it comes to the direction of the content. It’s geographical expansion plan also interestingly takes a stepping stone approach that branches out from existing cities and take advantage of the word of mouth and cross pollination of people between nearby cites like L.A., San Diego and San Francisco, in order to organically grow its branding and base of reviews.
Not trying to steer content makes sense. As does the “stepping stones” expansion approach.
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