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Utility Wants $17,500 Refund After Failure To Scrub Negative Search Results
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 $47,500. Hamilton said that he first raised the issue of the utility's online reputation when he was interviewing for the chief of staff job in early 2013. "All I saw were negative stories about storms, outages and pay increases and I raised it as a concern during that interview," he said. "And then after I started, [CEO Jorge Carrasco] and I discussed what we could do to more accurately represent the utility and what the utility is all about, because we didn't feel it was well represented online." Thus, the Brand.com contract. City Light says that it only ever thought Brand.com would help it place legitimate material in legitimate outlets—talking up some of the positive changes that have taken place at City Light during Carrasco's tenure. Instead, it appears to have received mostly bogus blog posts.
On the one hand, it was a dumb purchase on the part of Seattle City Light. But on the other hand, I do think there needs to be some crackdown on bullshit advertising in the SEO/PR sector. Maybe if a few companies get sued for breach of contract, they'll be more careful what services they claim to offer in the future.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Have fun with the Streisand Effect.
Utilities can really only have neutral or negative reputations.
Think about it, how often do you go "Wow, that was some amazing electricity I used this morning! It came right out of the socket when I needed it and didn't electrocute me at all"? You don't, because you expect those things as a basic requirement of the service and there aren't really many added extras they can provide to help you view them in a positive light. On the flip side, if there are outages or faults you almost automatically acquire a negative view of them and again there isn't really a lot they can do to counteract it.
See, this is what really pisses us off in Seattle. We don't have a choice. Our utility works relatively well and we have some of the cheapest electricity in the country. So, with that being the case, I don't mind not having a choice. Yet, stuff like this wasting of $17,500 causes our rates to go up. It's stupid. The real reason they did this was to bolster Jorge Carrasco's image so he could demand a bigger salary, which he lobbied our mayor for. He was trying to point to his reputation as a reason that other utilities were interested in him and, you know, if you want to keep him, pay him more... The guy should be fired.
Plus, he fell for a copper wire theft scheme and gave tens of thousands of dollars of wire to the thieves.
Let's see:
1. ousted from his last three jobs
2. trying to scrub his reputation to get a $60k/year raise
3, just happens to 'fall' for a con that gets $120k worth of materials
Sounds more like the con is in the hen house if you know what I mean ;)