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.
You can polish a turd. (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.
Re:You can polish a turd. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can polish a turd. (Score:5, Funny)
... we're having Peking Witch for dinner?
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Typical west coast corporate astroturfing.
Shit isn't supposed to stink in the Pacific northwest, so you pay someone to say otherwise.
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It takes a lot longer and a lot more effort to polish a turd as big as this CEO.
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Mythbusters notwithstanding.
When asked to polish a turd, what they are really asking you to do is cover it in glitter and spray paint.
Never forget that and actually try to polish a turd.
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Corpolite [wikipedia.org]
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.
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"bullshit advertising" ... Using bullshit as an adjective implies there is some advertising which is not bullshit. Just "advertising" works equally well.
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"bullshit advertising" ... Using bullshit as an adjective implies there is some advertising which is not bullshit. Just "advertising" works equally well.
I disagree. There is plenty of advertising which isn't bullshit. Ads for products most often are full of bullshit (though there are a few from time to time that aren't). On the other hand, ads for local businesses are often (though not always) fairly straightforward, simply indicated the products they sell or services they offer, and where they are located.
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...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.
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no one is stopping you from using Bing, or even Yahoo! if you're so inclined
I said, alternative, not imitation.
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 ;)
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.
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"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.
"The PR firm started acting like complete idiots and is making us look bad."
Not a crime, either, but probably a contract violation. Seattle Light is right to want their money back, if the firm couldn't deliver.
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"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"?
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.
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Wow, I'd say "intriguing" describes that best. Seedy world.
(FYI, your dropbox link had an 'i' appended; the working link is https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6or... [dropbox.com] )
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.
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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
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Who decided CEO needed reputation-washing? (Score:2)
What's a publicly-owned utility doing trying to hide the negative reputation of its CEO? Leave aside the question of whether the folks they hired to do it could do the job at the price they were charging, they still should have the guts to admit that the CEO they hired is the CEO they hired, and if they don't have the guts to do that, they should have hired somebody who didn't need reputation-washing.
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of course he was worth it. otherwise he wouldnt be ceo. but he is ceo. so he is worth it.
Jorge Carrasco (Score:2, Funny)
Jorge Carrasco sounds like a real moron. Maybe he'll try to get this article suppressed.
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LMGTFY.COM/Anonymous+Coward+says+Jorge+Carrasco+sounds+like+a+real+moron
Dude! It says "The page you were looking for doesn't exist." Oh, noes, he was successful!
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 g
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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.
Brand.com should have never taken that contract (Score:3)
Or they could have gotten a better CEO (Score:1, Interesting)
Have fun with the Streisand Effect.
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
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: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 ;)
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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.
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Seems like it to me. But it doesn't sound like the NSA; they're usually better at it than that.
Re: Who likes their utility? (Score:2)
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SF would have PUDed long ago, but PG&E owns all the transmission into the bay area anyhow.
So they prefer to continue getting fucked the old fashioned way. Kind of surprising for SF.
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I don't know if San Francisco itself wants that. The Bay Guardian was agitating for it for years, but that doesn't mean the city as a whole was in favor of it. Besides, they've got the Hetch Hetchy Dam providing much of their power supply, and it's been more reliable than much of the rest of the Bay Area's power.
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>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 o
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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.
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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
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A good reputation can result in a pay raise for the executives.
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Many utilities operated under a cost-plus arrangement. If they waste more money, they make more profits.
That is why stuff like this has to be prevented.
This is why Bell Labs back in the day got Nobel Prizes. This wasn't corporate philanthropy - at the time they could consider that R&D expenditure part of providing phone service and charge higher rates to recoup it, plus a profit on top. When the rules were changed, Bell Labs died (at least, in the sense of what it used to be).
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It's quite possible. I have a choice of power companies (and am planning to change some time soon.)
Here, generation, and retailing are all split up (not sure how lines maintenance works, I think that might be regional, but done though your retailer.)
This means a) I can pick my retailer, and b) they can compete, along with the generation companies.
(I'm not really contributing much here, just adding a little bit of possibly interesting information.)
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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.
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: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: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.
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It gets worse, the contract was $64k of company money, only $17.5k had been paid out so far.
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Bull. For me locally (NOT in US) the utilities have received praise from the customers for handling unexpected outages well.
The best way for an utility company to get a positive imago is to actually stick money to emergency readiness and upkeep of the hardware. Yes, it costs money, but when shit hits the fan and you shrug it off in no time (instead of giving excuses to the media while sucking), it pays off big time.
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I'm sure the guys who made off with 20 tons of copper wire [king5.com] could be persuaded to write a positive piece about Carrasco.
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Google 'lightning incidence map' and avoid looking like a smug idiot next time.
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Oddly enough, I'm pretty impressed with my local waste hauling company. I was getting overcharged for the size of garbage can I had for a number of years without me noticing after containers had been switched out to different types. I placed a single call to my utility company, and they told me they'd have to contact city hall, who manages the city-wide contract and billing. "Great, I'll never see that money", I thought, with quotes about "fighting city hall" coming to mind. A few weeks later, I see a f
Service VS product (Score:1)
There are two parts to a review, there's service and there's product.
Beyond the power itself, there's quality of customer service, wait times for calls or technicians, etc. Up-time is also a consideration
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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.
On the other hand, if you have a swift, efficient, and high quality service for an outage, most people understand that things fail and will forgive. It's only when YOU SUCK, repeatedly and without meeting customer needs in a quick and reliable way, that you get real negatives. And, if you actually work to improve these things (e.g., bury a
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They actually believer that can work? (Score:2)
Good news (Score:1)
Seattle CIty and Light has some *new* search engine results that have displaced any previous negative results. All of the controversy about the CEO's conduct regarding this and a few other recent scandals have completely obscured the previous negative stuff they were worried about!
The Repairer of Reputations (Score:2)
The Tattered King (Score:2)
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...
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No, Carrasco is not that stupid.
The Seattle politicians are THAT stupid, they are a first surface reflection of the voters.
The prices in Seattle are a leftover from hydro projects completed decades ago.
Washington/Seattle politicians and SCL are eroding that resource and shifting the monies to their pet constituents.
And the local press is the fat cheerleader.
Did we all miss the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
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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??
I hear you but I'm still working through my blind hatred of reputation management firms.
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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 rea
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In other news... (Score:2)
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.
The article "Jorge Fiasco" wants you to forget (Score:4, Informative)
Short Fuse: Jorge Carrasco's Polarizing Tenure at the Top of City Light [seattleweekly.com]
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 [seattletimes.com]
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.
Re:The article "Jorge Fiasco" wants you to forget (Score:4, Informative)
Another article Jorge Carasco would like you to forget: The Seattle Times: City Light leader Jorge Carrasco fell for copper con [seattletimes.com]
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.
Call to action (Score:3)
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.
A Better Term (Score:1)
I think this falls under the "gaslighting" utility service.
The ultimate leson here (Score:2)
Seriously it's a no-win business model. There was a reason they had bad publicity in the first place. There is a reason they'll turn on you.
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A better idea (Score:1)
brand.com (Score:1)
Carrasco is doubly stupid and possibly criminal (Score:2)
Brand.com deserves to burn in hell (Score:2)
The fact that a company blatantly states that they try to "enhance online branding and clear negatives by blanketing search results with positive content" means that are bold-faced EVIL. They are no longer even trying to hide it. That have accepted that society is malleable and that they can make a buck distorting the truth for the highest bidder.
They are mercenaries. They might not be shooting people in the face for money, but they're destroying the truth for money. They are paid to go censor people in the