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Utility Wants $17,500 Refund After Failure To Scrub Negative Search Results

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-you-don't-have-abything-good-to-say dept.

mpicpp Points out this story about Seattle City Light's anger over negative search results and its inability to get them removed. Seattle's publicly-owned electrical utility, City Light, is now demanding a refund for the $17,500 that it paid to Brand.com in a botched effort to boost the online reputation of its highly-paid chief executive, Jorge Carrasco. Brand.com "enhances online branding and clears negatives by blanketing search results with positive content" in an attempt to counteract unwanted search engine results. City Light signed a contract with the company in October 2013 and extended it in February 2014. The contracts authorized payments of up to $47,500. Hamilton said that he first raised the issue of the utility's online reputation when he was interviewing for the chief of staff job in early 2013. "All I saw were negative stories about storms, outages and pay increases and I raised it as a concern during that interview," he said. "And then after I started, [CEO Jorge Carrasco] and I discussed what we could do to more accurately represent the utility and what the utility is all about, because we didn't feel it was well represented online." Thus, the Brand.com contract. City Light says that it only ever thought Brand.com would help it place legitimate material in legitimate outlets—talking up some of the positive changes that have taken place at City Light during Carrasco's tenure. Instead, it appears to have received mostly bogus blog posts.

6 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Who likes their utility? by alen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People have hated utilities for as long as I can remember along with oil companies and starting in the 90's drug companies. And most recently ISP's and tv companies

    1. Re:Who likes their utility? by Known+Nutter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And who cares? It's not like you have a choice, particularly with real utilities. You can't just get your power from somewhere else. In the Bay Area, PG&E in constantly running campaigns to improve their reputation, mostly associated with the San Bruno disaster. Why? Shareholder value? If so, I guess I don't quite understand what public reputation of a utility has to do with shareholder value. Perhaps state and municipal permitting related to system construction, rate increases with the PUC to fund said construction... ...thinking outloud here, it seems.

      --
      Beware of the Leopard.
  2. That's Fine by Greyfox · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If they want to go after a SEO company for not optimizing their search results, I don't see anything wrong with that. But has Seattle City Light considered just NOT SUCKING as a strategy to improve their reputation? Seems to me that analyzing the root cause of the problem ("Man, we REALLY suck!") and fixing it ("Hey, has anyone thought about maybe trying NOT sucking?") would be a good bit less expensive. Seems like only an idiot would say "Hey here's an idea! Let's pay 20 grand to some company and then we can keep sucking!" Of course, as a power company you kind of have a captive audience, so it seems like you could really suck all you want to as long as you don't capture the attention of various regulatory bodies in the process.

    *shrug* I don't live in Seattle, so I don't know anything about it, but the internets say they suck pretty hard. I'm guessing their SEO company kind of sucks, too. Birds of a feather, eh?

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  3. Re:hope they win by theskipper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the interesting question is how will Brand.com get this negative story about themselves scrubbed/buried in the indexes.

    (This smells oddly recursive, especially if they wrote a white paper about how successful they were ;)

  4. Re:hope they win by mtrachtenberg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's beyond just dumb. This is the sort of waste of public money that really should be criminal. At the very least, the CEO and his Chief of Staff should be dismissed. Call it encouragement to resign if that's the way it's done these days, but if someone getting paid $200K plus thought this was worth it, that person is not worth it.

  5. Re:hope they win by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agree. This isn't an SEO issue so much as stewardship issue. Utilities shouldn't be advertising, unless it is part of some kind of public service goal (like informing poor people of benefits programs or something like that).

    Utilities are generally monopolies. If I want electricity for my home, there is exactly one place to get it. If I don't want it, that should be fine. There should be no expenditure of what amounts to a form of tax dollars to advertise services that aren't in competition with anything else.

    Ditto for utilities sponsoring the Olympics and such. If funding the Olympics is a valid political goal then it should just get a spending bill in the legislature like anything else.