No, that’s Matt Damon
I know what you are thinking: “Wow, Harvard, huh? Isn’t that where they have janitors who are so smart that they figure out super-complicated math formulas that were left on the chalkboards overnight?” Harvard is indeed chock full o’ smartypants, but that janitor was from the movie, “Good Will Hunting.”
A 5-9% increase in revenue
This Harvard Yelp study is called “Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com,” which sounded ultra Harvardey to me even before I read (um, scanned) the paper. The thing that caught my attention was that the study says that a one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue for a local (non-chain) restaurant. Wow. That factoid was worth the price of downloading, which of course is free. It’s one more reason to remember to nurture your Yelp following, as well as your presence across the entire realm of social media.