Seattle City Light Wants A Refund On Their Online Reputation Boosting Bill Funded By Taxpayers

from the streisand-multiplier dept

So let's say you're a highly-paid CEO of Seattle's publically-owned utility company, City Light, and you've just been ironically kicked around in the media for a couple of weeks because you spent public money to boost your own reputation. Let's say that, far from being successful in said reputation-boosting, you're now facing questions over why you spent thousands of dollars to do this in the first place and that now all search results tend to point to this story rather than whatever it was you were originally trying to drown out. What do you do?

You ask for a damned refund, of course. And that's exactly what City Light's chief, Jorge Carrasco, is going to do, even if it has to spend even more public money to get that public money back.

The project was concocted by the CEO’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton. In an interview with Ars, Hamilton said that the agency may even file a lawsuit to enforce this refund.

"We're leaving our options open,” he said. “I hope that they'll see that what we signed up for was not the service that they delivered. We were sold one bill of goods and we were given another.”

Ah, yes, the old "spend more public money on a lawsuit to get a refund on the public money we shouldn't have spent" strategy. I like it, not only because it's hilariously recursive, but because it allows for the possibility that City Light loses and the maximum amount of taxpayer money is spent inappropriately. Not that the folks they decided to do business with, Brand.com, seem to be anything remotely resembling reputable (editors note: alliteration combo!).

“We were told that they would provide help in getting some of our past material and news releases placed in reputable blogs and journals and ultimately didn't know that they would be paying for placement or creating fake news websites to place that news,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And ultimately, all of the material that was generated has been taken off search results because it violated Google's policies.”

E-mails from City Light show that Justin DeLisi, a Brand.com campaign manager, provided links to “stories” posted to websites that have since been pulled down and that appear to have been utterly fake. The "whois" information on those domains, which include weeklytimes.com, gazers.com, and advisories.com, is also obscured.

So, just to summarize, City Light, a publically owned utility, paid a shady reputation company thousands of dollars to placate the ego of its CEO and now wants a refund because said shady company wasn't able to produce results. Oh, and they're willing to spend the money to file and fight a lawsuit to get this refund. Look, at some point you just have to stop digging, even if you've legitimately been had. City Light's reputation hasn't been done any favors by any of these actions. Jorge Carrasco may want to take a little bit of advice from himself.

Carrasco said at a press conference that he regretted the entire effort to scrub his online reputation. Hamilton concurred. “It was an experiment that certainly didn't work and we would not do it again,” he told Ars.

Right, so just extend that regret out to this entire situation and stop digging yourself holes. Come on, guys, I don't want to have to write a third post about you.

Filed Under: jorge carrasco, refund, reputation, reputation management, seattle, sephir hamilton
Companies: brand.com, city light

Seattle Taxpayer Money Used To Bolster The Online Reputation Of Utility CEO

from the how'd-that-work-out? dept

We've written previously about this online reputation management thing and how often it backfires. For some reason, there are people out there who somehow think that you can effectively hide your past from the internet instead of understanding both how futile a thing that is to attempt and how horribly it can backfire on you. Celebrities, athletes, and criminals all have been forced to learn this lesson the hard way. But, hey, at least they didn't use taxpayer money in their attempts.

The same can't be said for the city of Seattle, which one paper discovered has been footing the bill for two years worth of internet reputation management of a utility company's CEO.

A newly-published document shows that Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility paid thousands of dollars to Brand.com to manage the online reputation of CEO Jorge Carrasco. The document, which was received and published Saturday by the Seattle Times after a public records request, shows that Brand.com charged City Light $5,000 in December 2013.

The report adds that the company actually extended that contract into 2014 and has paid out a total of $17,500, which really sucks considering the utility company is owned by the municipality. Any way you slice it, that sure sounds like thousands of dollars of taxpayer money went to bury some less-than-flattering links about Jorge Carrasco with trumped up positive search results. The most infuriating part of this is that nobody really seems to be able to find anything about Carrasco worth hiding.

It’s not clear what negative stories City Light executives were trying to squash—or whether the utility got any lasting results for its money. Google search results for City Light last week were dominated by news and criticism of Carrasco’s proposed raise. Among the negative headlines from previous years that ranked high in search results was a Seattle Weekly article from 2008 that called Carrasco’s tenure at City Light “polarizing” and described the utility as “beleaguered.”

I mean, people bitching about you getting a raise might not be the most welcome thing ever, but battling that criticism about you getting more money by spending taxpayer money to drown out that criticism may not be the best of plans. Hello Streisand Effect. On top of that silliness, some other folks are getting caught up in the fallout.

"Among the mentions generated for City Light by the deal were blog posts on websites including Huffington Post, which did not disclose they were connected to a paid marketing campaign for the utility," the Times added. The relevant article on the Huffington Post has since been removed. Neither City Light nor Dana Robinson Slote, a city spokeswoman, immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. Ars did however put in a public records request for these documents.

Yeah, while rules dealing with what must be disclosed and when can tread into silly territory, this is kind of a huge no-no. If larger blogging sources like The Huffington Post are suddenly allowing unacknowledged paid articles to be posted to their site, readers are going to quickly lose trust. If THP received no payment for this article, which is very hard to believe, they will still find readers questioning what else on the site has been bought and paid for.

So way to go, City Light. Once again, attempts to "manage" online reputations results in everyone being worse off. Enjoy that Streisand Effect.

Filed Under: jorge carrasco, reputation management, seattle, taxpayer funds
Companies: brand.com