Daniel,
Here's an exert taken from an article in the December issue of FixedOps Magazine by Brad Simmons. Brad doesn't offer any answers to your question Dan but the article is relevant to the subject around just how will we be possibly forced to play nice with Yelp in the near future.
Yelp recently announced that 100 million monthly unique visitors visited its site in January 2013. To put this in perspective, this is about 10 times the monthly traffic of AutoTrader.com
The Future: Yelp is a long-Term cost of doing Business, not a differentiator
For the broader auto repair industry, there are several lessons from Silicon Valley’s Yelp experience:
1) Yelp will soon be the first website your customers look to before deciding which repair shop to visit.
2) Shops must use all available legal means to boost their Yelp reviews.
3) 4.0-star reviews are not good enough! Your competitors will work with ven- dors and use other aggressive tactics to boost their Yelp reviews, which will force you to do the same. As we have seen in San Francisco, this is an arms race. Ser- vice centers who ignore Yelp and main- tain a seemingly respectable 3.5- or 4.0- star rating will lose business.
4) Before Yelp has saturated your mar- ket, there will be a short period where you can gain a decisive competitive ad- vantage by “artificially” boosting your Yelp reviews.
5) After the market stabilizes and most shops have 4.5 or 5.0 star ratings, Yelp will no longer be a differentiating factor and will instead be a cost of doing busi- ness. When every Service facility has 5.0 star ratings and 50 reviews, then the market resets and other, more enduring differentiating factors become critical.
Get the full PDF download here --> http://fixedopsmag.com/magazine/novdec2013/document.pdf
A few more conversations around Yelp can be found here - Two Thumbs Down to Yelp Ads: A Response to Dylan Swift at DSES
and here - http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/behind-yelp-fake-reviews-3679.html
and here - http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f21/does-yelp-manipulate-reviews-their-own-profit-3441.html
and here - http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/did-apple-bring-yelp-back-dead-3655.html
I cringed when Apple announced their integration of Yelp into iOS6. And here you are, as an example for why.