Yelp.com is quickly becoming one of the most popular user review and business rating sites on the planet, and has built a small army of loyal users, or ‘Yelpers”, to buffer this growth. Many business owners have a love/hate relationship with it. When they get good reviews, they love it. But bad reviews have the power to stir up even the most deep seeded hatred for the messenger… and can leave some business owners in the psyche ward, literally.

Transparency is officially in, whether we like it or not. This is only good news if you provide a great product and customer experience. The bad news is that if you don’t, Yelp will let you, and a massive amount of your current and potential customers know.

Check out this excerpt from the article on Inc. below:

For two days, Goodman was transfixed by the discussion — and she started to get paranoid. “I couldn’t tell if the people coming into the store were real customers or just people who were going to say something about me on Yelp,” she says. A customer would ask an innocuous question — for instance, “How long have you been open?” — and Goodman would panic, fearing that her response might become fodder for yet another Yelp comment. “I was saying to myself, ‘Come on; that’s crazy,’ ” she says. ” ‘Don’t think this way.’ ”

At the end of the second day, she decided to end the crisis by apologizing. She figured out Sean’s last name — Clare — with a Google search and found his address in the white pages. His house was just two blocks from her store. She walked up the stairs to his front porch and, at 6 o’clock on a Sunday evening, knocked on his door.

Accounts differ as to what happened next, but a struggle ensued. Goodman says she started to explain that she had come to apologize for her e-mails and was attacked; Clare says Goodman began yelling, forced her way into his house, and refused to leave. In any case, the two became entangled, grappling until Goodman fell down the steps. When she hit the ground, Clare ran back inside and slammed the door. The police arrived a few minutes later.