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.

Comments

You can polish a turd.

[sjames]

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.

Re:You can polish a turd.

[pollarda]

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

Re:You can polish a turd.

[arth1]

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

hope they win

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:hope they win

[theskipper]

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 ;)

Re:hope they win

[mtrachtenberg]

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.

Re:hope they win

[Rich0]

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.

Re:hope they win

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Who likes their utility?

[alen]

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

Re:Who likes their utility?

[Known Nutter]

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.

Re:Who likes their utility?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's Fine

[Greyfox]

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?