By Romi Cablay and Kelly Lan, Courier Staff Writers
Millions of people use Yelp to look up good places to eat and cool places to visit. But how exactly does someone become a professional Yelper and what does that mean?
Yelp has an Elite Council that is based in San Francisco and they are the ones who choose who can become a professional “Yelper.”
Becoming an elite on Yelp means that you become a “ tastemaker.” You also need to become an active member of the Yelp community.
In order to be part of the community, you need to create a precise profile of yourself. The main step of becoming a member is to write as many useful and open-minded reviews of your food and/or drinks. The more reviews you write, the more valuable you become to to the managers of the community.
Another big step of becoming a member is interacting with their fellow Yelpers and community managers. Communicating with other members or new members of the community will help have your name well known and boost up your chance of getting nominated.
Anyone can nominate themselves on Yelp’s site and nominations are sent to the Elite Council based in San Francisco. Once the nominations are submitted, the nominee is vetted to make sure they’re writing are up to Yelp’s standards and are candid.
According to Yelp, there’s no specific benchmark that people have to meet in order to become an elite member on yelp. They just need to be writing quality reviews on yelp and they have to get pre approved each year in order to continue being an elite.
Once someone becomes an elite, they can get many privileges. Many up-and-coming restaurants will invite them to private events with free food and drinks in exchange for high quality reviews.
Hazel Carrasco, a James Logan teacher, became a Yelp Elite on September of 2014. What encouraged her to become an elite was to meet new people and she also wanted to get back into writing. She felt that it was really nice getting appreciated for her work from businesses and getting feedback from other people about her reviews.
Carrasco also talks about how people misapprehend Yelpers because they are thought to ruin businesses. Most Elite Yelpers are fair and honest about their reviews and only want to help businesses.
The cons of being an Elite Yelper is that she had to have a lot of patience to write which tends to be long and detailed. The pros are that she got to meet other people around the United States, taste other kinds of foods, and going to parties which are free events. She became really good friends with many Yelpers.
She rarely likes chain food such McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s etc. She loves trying different kinds of cuisines and going to authentic foods restaurant. Especially when she travels. She enjoys going to many unique restaurants around the area.