Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

40 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. You can polish a turd. by sjames · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Mythbusters showed us you CAN polish a turd. This suggests you still can't polish a CEO.

    The natural conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

    1. Re:You can polish a turd. by pollarda · · Score: 5, Funny

      Let's see.... What you are saying is .... If ducks float and witches float then ....

    2. Re:You can polish a turd. by arth1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      ... we're having Peking Witch for dinner?

  2. hope they win by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:hope they win by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "bullshit advertising" ... Using bullshit as an adjective implies there is some advertising which is not bullshit. Just "advertising" works equally well.

    2. Re:hope they win by fustakrakich · · Score: 2, Informative

      ...I do think there needs to be some crackdown on bullshit advertising in the SEO/PR sector.

      Oh please! The very premise is based on fraud. People should just learn to ignore it. And we desperately need alternatives to Google. It is so heavily compromised. It's hardly anything more than a barroom trivia and shopping site.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    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 Anrego · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It actually feels like they are trying to put a positive "victim" light on themselves.

      "We hired this company because we felt our good side wasn't being shown on the internet and asked them to market all the good stuff we've done, and they turned on us and just started spamming garbage everywhere! That's not what we wanted!"

      Whether there is any truth to that, who knows.

    5. 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.

    6. Re:hope they win by WaffleMonster · · Score: 2

      "We hired a PR firm to make us look better."
      That's not a crime. It's not even morally wrong, unless the means chosen was fraud or the like.

      To me this sounds too much like asking police to racially profile someone without racially profiling them for comfort.

      I would love to hear how a PR firm makes companies look better online without lying and misleading.

      Do they make blog posts saying how great the company is and include the fact they are working for a PR firm and being paid by company to produce content on their behalf? Or just leave that part out? Any examples of how it can work in a way that is not "morally wrong"?

    7. 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.

    8. Re:hope they win by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Seattle City Light is owned by the city of Seattle.

      As somebody who lives in Seattle, I'm more than happy to pay for the failed contract. It was a large part of why we're not having to give the CEO a $60k a year raise. So, even after paying for the bullshit contract, it's still costing us less money. And thanks to this bullshit getting into the national press, it's unlikely that he's going to be able to get a job at any other utility for a while.

      Overall, the utility customers are coming out ahead on the deal.

    9. Re:hope they win by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Http://ilccyberreport.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/tiny-iowa-county-takes-on-the-king-of-online-defamation/

      You might find this article interesting..

      Brand.com is a rebrand of a company called reputationchanger.com, which was launched by the convicted felon Adam Zuckerman soon after acquiring a SQL injection technique (in 2011) which was used to add "noindex, nofollow" tags to complaint website pages and comment pages on blogs which effectively removes a page from search engine results.

      It's long but worth the read to download the search warrant linked in the article ( https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6orjid9iahp0568/AABQZSlC2iOzDIRzc7i1SzL3ai ) if you want an early preview of some of the dirt which will likely be getting coverage soon in the news cycle regarding the reputation "wreck and repair" racket which is an ongoing extortion racket in the "online reputation management" and seo world.

      http://www.paladinpi.com/blog/paladin-investigations-2/social-waterboarding-chapter/

      has further commentary to help digest the search warrant document.

      The big dog with millions in investment capital (and looking to IPO soon), Reputation.com, is one of the primary actors in this racket, having been caught buying the company/website "removeyourname.com" of the hacker Matthew Cooke which was peddling the SQL injection code to all of the ORM companies stupid/sleazy enough to take the bait for some quick cash wrecking then repairing middle class business owners and professionals who could afford to pay to stop the pain.

      Complaint sites, mugshot sites and revenge porn sites are the trifecta on the "wrecking" side of this racket, with the "repair" side being offered up by sites such as reputation.com, brand.com and countless multitudes of smaller sites sprinkled around the internet acting as franchised feeders into the main cartel of "repair" reputation companies which are in collusion with the "wrecking" industry by either outright ownership and management of the wrecking sites which they can remove content from or by paying agreed upon fees to "outside the network" sites.

  3. Jorge Carrasco by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Jorge Carrasco sounds like a real moron. Maybe he'll try to get this article suppressed.

  4. I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That sounds like a legitimate way to attempt to alter search rank results, mentioning the link and name repeatedly. Did they actually speak to and control what was happening? It sounds like they threw money at someone and yelled GO FIX THIS with no direction or oversight and so the company just did the basic job with no instructions. I'm taking a wild guess that the mostly negative online reviews are a result of this type of hands off old boys club 'let the peons work while we master architects go play golf' attitude when it comes to important projects. If they gave a damn they would have been hands on instructing the company which avenues to pursue to alter their brand online and how to go about doing that.

    1. Re:I don't get it by sjames · · Score: 2

      With fake news, fake blogs, and attempting to find an excuse (ANY excuse) to have an article taken down or de-listed?

      You have lowered your expectations WAYYYYYYYyy too much.

  5. Brand.com should have never taken that contract by rebelwarlock · · Score: 2

    Don't take a contract you can't handle. If you claim to be able to do something, and you can't, you're in breach of contract. It doesn't matter how retarded the whole situation was - you agreed to do something and took money for it, then failed to follow through.

  6. 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. Re:Who likes their utility? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not mine. Everybody here loves the Power Board. Of course, that's most recently because they started offering high-speed fiber internet and compared to Comcast, anybody would be decent, and they're just plain AWESOME.

      Now true, some people did complain about the TVA flooding their homes, and Ronald Reagan waxed eloquently about how horrible they were, but the reality is...the people in the area LIKE the TVA, and don't want some Southern/Duke/Enron company coming in.

    3. Re:Who likes their utility? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Who likes their utility? by Immerman · · Score: 2

      >Why? Shareholder value?
      -
      It seems simple enough to me: increased customer satisfaction (aka reputation in a captive market) means you can inflate your prices and/or reduce the quality of service with less backlash.

      I can't think of any other reason a monopoly would care about it's reputation.

      Electricity providers though, there I could see some motive. They are beginning to lose their monopoly with solar becoming a viable and cost-effective alternative in most places. If you can pay for ten years worth of electricity up front you can get the next 10-20 years after that free.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    5. Re:Who likes their utility? by Known+Nutter · · Score: 2

      It seems simple enough to me: increased customer satisfaction (aka reputation in a captive market) means you can inflate your prices and/or reduce the quality of service with less backlash.

      It's not quite that simple. Using PG&E as an example, they cannot just inflate their prices. Rate increases must be approved by the State of California Public Utilities Commission, as must rate increases for every other utility in the state.

      --
      Beware of the Leopard.
    6. Re:Who likes their utility? by Immerman · · Score: 2

      Indeed. And how much more successful do you suppose their lobbyists will be in facilitating such rate increases if they have a good reputation to bank on? The worse their reputation the more people will protest against rate increases, thus increasing the political capital politicians will have to spend to pass them, which in turn will increase the size of the campaign contributions necessary to get them passed.

      At some point it becomes more cost effective to run PR campaigns in hopes of increasing approval ratings and thus lowering the size of the necessary campaign contributions.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  7. 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?

    1. Re:That's Fine by Spad · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:That's Fine by __aanbvm4272 · · Score: 2

      SEO stands for Sucking Executive Officer

    3. Re:That's Fine by Guppy06 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      On the other hand, TFA seems to indicate that this SEO fiasco was less about trying to improve the utility's reputation than about improving the executive's personal reputation.

      $18k of company money to try to justify a personal $60k/a raise really doesn't sound good.

    4. Re:That's Fine by PPH · · Score: 2

      I'm sure the guys who made off with 20 tons of copper wire could be persuaded to write a positive piece about Carrasco.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    5. Re:That's Fine by volmtech · · Score: 2

      Actually, yes, during the severe electrical storm yesterday my lights only flickered a couple of times. All the tree trimming and lighting arrestors Florida Power and Light has installed since the 05 hurricanes has helped a lot. Even with these cost and the retiring of one of their nuclear plants my cost per kWh has only gone up a few percent to $.10. Improving service without raising cost does generate good will. Next time they need a rate increase they wont have much getting one.

    6. Re:That's Fine by Imrik · · Score: 2

      It gets worse, the contract was $64k of company money, only $17.5k had been paid out so far.

  8. They actually believer that can work? by thieh · · Score: 2

    I would imagine if Brand.com is actually effective Rick Santorum would already have used it back in 2012.

  9. lol by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Interviewer: So what can you do for this company...
    Interviewee: There's this dude down the street with Magic beans!
    Interviewer: You're hired! Now go get them beans!
    Interviewee: You really bought that? er... ok... you realize that was an interview and much like televisions commercials I'm expected to exaggerate right?
    Interviewer: You promised me beans give me some beans!
    Interviewee: ooook... here ya go...
    *2yrs later*
    Interviewer: These beans aren't growing!... lets just sue that bean salesman, clearly these beans were defective..
    Interviewee: I really need to find a new job but I don't want to go through another interview like that last one...

  10. Did we all miss the point? by Yew2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Im a little disappointed in these comments! I dont see anyone complaining that a utility is even spending money on this sorta thing, much less a publicly owned utility....did I miss the part where we started enjoying abuses from the mono/duopolies to which we are all conscripted?? From the rich right down to the poorest or poor in our citizenry, we all pay for utilities, one way or another. It could even be argued that the brand of gravy fed the homeless is one slot cheaper because soup kitchens pay these bills too. Has the world gone mad?? Since when can a public resource use funds in this way? Where is the outrage? Where is the inquisition? I would even go so far as to say even were this service offered for free of charge to this utility that they are engaging in a cover-up! Fraud! Deceit! Pitchfork, anyone? Hello? Anyone?

    --
    will work for dragon quest localization
  11. Public money wasted by mtrachtenberg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    $17,500 to polish your CEO's reputation? The CEO and the Chief of Staff should both be fired. Or, in keeping with the CEO's resume, encouraged to "resign." And suing to recover the money is likely to cost the public more than just giving up on the wasted funds. Just cut your losses, Seattle.

  12. The article "Jorge Fiasco" wants you to forget by McGruber · · Score: 3, Informative
    I RTFA and learned that this is the article that "Jorge Fiasco" (Jorge Carrasco" wants google and everyone else to forget about:

    Short Fuse: Jorge Carrasco's Polarizing Tenure at the Top of City Light

    I also see that the deal with brand.com has cost Jorge Fiasco a six figure pay raise: The Seattle Times: No pay raise for City Light CEO Jorge Carrasco

    Seattle Mayor Ed Murray says he will not give City Light CEO Jorge Carrasco a pay raise, citing “judgment” issues, including a contract aimed partly at boosting Carrasco’s online image.

    Murray made the comments at a City Hall news conference Wednesday.

    The Seattle City Council had authorized a pay increase of up to $119,000 for Carrasco, who currently makes $245,000. Murray’s office previously had said he was considering raising Carrasco’s pay by $60,000.

    1. Re:The article "Jorge Fiasco" wants you to forget by McGruber · · Score: 3, Informative

      Another article Jorge Carasco would like you to forget: The Seattle Times: City Light leader Jorge Carrasco fell for copper con

      Last year, two men claiming to be members of the Cherokee Nation who had traveled from Oklahoma came to Seattle with a simple goal: score some scrap copper.

      Dressed in beads and fringed suede, with one wearing a cap that said “Native,” they headed to the offices of Seattle City Light, where they chanced upon its superintendent, Jorge Carrasco, in the lobby. They told him they ran a nonprofit that taught disabled children how to make jewelry and needed some copper wire.

      Minutes after meeting them, Carrasco authorized the men to be given some scrap.

      But the two were actually con men. Once inside City Light’s secure facilities, they were able to drive off with 20 tons of copper wire and scrap metal worth $120,000.

  13. Maybe he *IS* the con... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 ;)

    1. Re:Maybe he *IS* the con... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 2

      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

      About point 2: $119,000, not $60,000

      About point 3: The stolen material was recovered.

      --
      If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  14. Call to action by WaffleMonster · · Score: 2

    Everyone who runs sites where users can post comments should add language to terms of service forbidding using your service to spread paid propaganda.

    Adding a dialogue asking if you are operating on behalf of a reputation firm would be even better because then they become guilty of circumventing an access control when they lie to gain access.

    Using insane corporate laws against corporations = priceless.