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.
hope they win (Score:5, 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.
Or they could have gotten a better CEO (Score:1, Interesting)
Have fun with the Streisand Effect.
Re:That's Fine (Score:4, 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.
Re:Who likes their utility? (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.
Maybe he *IS* the con... (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 ;)
Re:hope they win (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.