The star of the Gen Y social networking sites is not FaceBook. It is Yelp.com. .. a site that consists of mainly user reviews.

Sure FaceBook has more traffic and more media buzz, but Yelp! seems to be acing grassroots marketing and is the scoring big with the 20 and 30 somethings. Yelp provides lets users review anything – bars, clubs, doctors, lawyers, etc. It is taking on and gaining on local services such as GoogleMaps, YahooLocal!. Yelp seems to do at the local level. It’s blog highlights all the local marketing it is doing — getting to the local influencers. To read more about Yelp.. check out the web sites below:

• www.Yelp.com
• Red Herring: Yelp Gets $3M-Plus in VC Cash
• Forbes: Yelp: Not Your Mother’s Local Review Site
• The Register: Yelp! A viral recommendation system you can’t resist?
• Businessweek: Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs
• San Francisco Chronicle: CASTING THE NET / Yelp is on the way
• San Francisco Chronicle: Amateur reviews changing approach of small businesses
• Seattle Post Intelligencer: When diners speak up online, restaurants listen
• Fortune: Business paradigm shifts and free tequila shots

Points for reflection:

• Gen Y will listen to their peers
• Gen Y wants the bigger companies to go local if they are going to market to them
  Gen Y will listen to marketers and C-level employees if they can relate to them (if they are Gen Y) or if they can learn from them
• Gen Y might just surprise you and go against the trend