eKaiser Insurance Sucks.com

The purpose of this web site is to chronicle and explore Kaiser Permanente’s latest internet advertising and social media PR campaign for eKaiser Insurance (see press release). We will also detail some of the problems at Kaiser, to foster a better understanding of our reasons for starting this campaign, and for choosing Kaiser as our primary example.

We believe in corporate transparency in general and especially in transparency in health care, and we are very concerned by the attempts of corporations like Kaiser to exploit social media and the internet for their twisted PR purposes. We run two web sites that are critical of Kaiser and we resent the attempt to manage and analyze what we’re doing, so it can be “countered.” The truth isn’t something that should be strategized out of existence; it just is.

But alas, we are a long way from corporate transparency.

We plan to teach you how to spot PRBSâ„¢, and how to point it out and counter it by sharing personal experiences, and by giving examples and linking to resources online that dispute Kaiser’s whitewashing of its reputation. No, we don’t believe Kaiser is all bad, but we know that the negative aspects of Kaiser are very bad, and that the only hope for improvement is if they are no longer allowed to cover up these issues, or gloss over them with fancy (and very expensive) advertising.

Kaiser has resorted to downright blackhat SEO tactics to make it difficult for people to find us, which is one way to handle negative internet buzz. Another way would be to correct the problems we are reporting to remove the source of our material. But then the PR goons would be out of a job, and all hell would break loose apparently.

Next time: How to recognize PRBS™ — Part I