The city’s housing authority will spend $200,000 in taxpayer loot for an online image makeover — an attempt to counter critical stories with happy tweets about gardens and senior citizen programs.
Rebecca Bilbao and her company, Search Impact Consulting Group, recently won a second contract with the authority to alter what viewers see when they search “NYCHA” on Google.
Bilbao’s LinkedIn profile describes her work as “digital brand management services for monitoring, analyzing and managing her clients’ digital presence.” One way to do that is to tweet positive NYCHA stories, increasing the likelihood that these stories will pop up at the top of a NYCHA Web search.
“It seems that NYCHA wants to bury the problem rather than fix it,” said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan), who has criticized the cash-strapped agency for spending public dollars to improve its image. Search Impact was first hired in April 2011, then rehired a few weeks ago.
When Bilbao first began working for NYCHA, she posted on Twitter only occasionally. She put up links to upbeat stories about NYCHA programs and Chairman John Rhea’s speeches to civic groups.
Then in May, when the Daily News began publishing stories about NYCHA mismanagement, her tweets multiplied, usually at the same time the stories appeared.
On July 13, The News revealed NYCHA was sitting on $42 million set-aside for security cameras in high-crime developments.
The day after, Bilbao went to work.
She posted a link via Twitter to a NYCHA press release from the prior week on Mayor Bloomberg and Rhea’s announcing NYCHA’s “energy efficiency program.”
A similar reaction took place in the days leading up to July 29, when The News disclosed NYCHA’s ghost town — an abandoned Brooklyn development that still hadn’t been fixed up 13 years after money was set aside for that purpose.
On Twitter, Bilbao posted NYCHA press releases on “security camera facts” and one about Rhea’s speaking to residents who were going to graduate from a “clean energy corps.”
More fluffy stories followed in mid-September as The News described horrid conditions at three different authority developments, including a mother and her wheelchair-bound son injured by an unprotected heat pipe in their poorly maintained apartment.
Bilbao’s tweet highlighted a new garden at a Brooklyn project and a senior citizens show at a Bronx project. She also tweeted a pleasant New York Times story trumpeting NYCHA board member Emily Youssouf that dated back to 2011, and an op-ed by Youssouf in The News from 2010.
On Friday, Bilbao — whose Web profile lists her as a “consultant to the New York City Housing Authority” — declined to answer questions about her tweets.
Assemblywoman Rosenthal questioned why NYCHA would spend a nickel on an image consultant when it has a backlog of 338,000 apartment repairs.
“Why can’t one of (NYCHA’s staff) do this?” Rosenthal asked. “Why do they have to provide somebody in Washington State with employment? Why can’t we find somebody from New York City to do this?”
Rhea said in a recent letter to Rosenthal that his staff isn’t qualified to handle this sophisticated task.
“Since we do not have IT staff within NYCHA who has (sic) the expertise necessary to make sure that the information that we share with our residents and outside parties is easy to access, we had to seek an outside consultant.”
Rhea, a former Wall Street executive with no housing experience, says the consultant will make it easier for NYCHA’s working-class residents to search housing laws.
“NYCHA residents are subjected to regulatory and statutory changes made by all levels of government. Hence it is important for public housing residents and outside parties to keep up with any and all changes from within and outside the agency.”
NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback noted that since Bilbao was hired, searches for the agency are up 90%. The Housing Authority is also training employees and residents “to become social media specialists for the project; already one resident has been hired to begin this work.”
She couldn’t say how much the NYCHA resident/social media specialist would be paid.
