Utility Wants $17,500 Refund After Failure To Scrub Negative Search Results 110
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.
I don't get it (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.
Who likes their utility? (Score:5, 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
That's Fine (Score:5, Insightful)
*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?
Re:Who likes their utility? (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.
Re:hope they win (Score:2, Insightful)
"bullshit advertising" ... Using bullshit as an adjective implies there is some advertising which is not bullshit. Just "advertising" works equally well.
lol (Score:4, 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...
Re:That's Fine (Score:4, 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.
Re:hope they win (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 ;)
Did we all miss the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hope they win (Score:4, 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.
Public money wasted (Score:4, 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.
Re:hope they win (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.
Re:hope they win (Score:5, 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.
Re:hope they win (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.