I found this news story of a woman getting kicked off a train for being loud on her cellphone. The kicker about this story was how she protested that she shouldn’t be reprimanded because she is “very well educated”. Her point, which holds no merit, is kind of ironic: most well educated people would a) know not to speak so loudly in the first place, or b) know this is a battle they cannot win.
Being a Sunday night, after the US Open, Stanley Cup and NBA Finals have finished, I investigated this story out of boredom for my own entertainment… I found the YouTube video of it happening, so I perused the comments to see what people had said (reading Internet comments are my guilty pleasure. Total empty calories). And then I noticed one of the commenters was, apparently, the woman in the video. The user was using the first-person, and adamantly defensive.
The username of the account was a full name. So, I googled it to find out more. All the right things fit, a LinkedIn page [since deleted], pictures, powerpoint presentations… all signs point to her being the woman in the video. Now, I’m pretty convinced it is the same person, but… maybe, somehow, I could be wrong. So it should be noted that everything is “allegedly”.
I am currently working on workshops for college students about how to understand and control your online brand, and this is the perfect example of a bad decision:
I googled the name the same way any potential employer might (just typing in the full name with no added tags like train, obnoxious, or pretentious), a couple of powerpoint presentations, I am assuming from college, come up… which is pretty good. After that, though, it is very ugly. There are blogs, comments, and news stories about her involvement in this incident.
One blogger, who also found out how easy it was to find her name and thus other information, made the quick connection that in her LinkedIn page she touts “communication” as a skill. Well, that video sure isn’t the best reference to that!
This woman should NOT have created the YouTube account using her full name as the username (it was created today), and then commented on the video, or repost it trying to defend herself. Had she not done this, it would have been really hard to make the connection between who was in the video and her actual name. But, by doing so, she is drawing MORE attention to it, unlike showbiz, there IS such a thing as bad publicity in job searching.
The only ways to find out who she was would be if a police report were filed (which is highly unlikely) or someone recognizes her and outs her on the Internet (which is actually surprisingly just as unlikely, usually people don’t do that unless the person in question is high-profile).
But now this woman has opened the door to harassment from the Internet, and embarrassment with friends, family and potential employers.
The Internet is pretty permanent. Personal vengeance, venting, even defending yourself like this woman attempted to do, can be a bad decision because it draws attention to a story that, actually, most people would never find out about. She may succeed in getting a lot of this bad content removed, but still, Internet pages are cached, which means that nothing really gets deleted, it just “goes away”.
Case in point: The woman apparently deleted all her social networking sites (Facebook, twitter, linkedin), but cached versions are available for download in a pdf. I will not link them because I feel spreading it around would be akin to gossip… you can probably find it on your own if you are curious.
So take notes: In my opinion, her actions in the video were immature and ill-advised to begin with. Her actions on the Internet afterward have created footprints of web activity that she has no control over and will link her to this incident and cast a bad light on her candidacy as a job seeker… which I assume she is, her facebook page says she works at “Currently Unemployed”. That page is linked from the YouTube account.
In the year 2011, it is more likely that an employer WILL google you, or otherwise search for your Internet activity, than will not.
I think what most people fail to recognize, and what I believe this woman failed to consider when she made it too easy for people to find out who she is, is that the Internet is VICIOUS. People on the Internet love to latch on to someone and humiliate them. That is what is happening to this woman currently on blogs and facebook.
With that, I would also like to note that I use this incident as an example for professional development, and not to add to her current humiliation. The only judgement I make on her character is that she was not considerate of her actions and the repercussions. Other venues, like the facebook fan page that was created in her name, are far, far less merciful.
[SHOULD BE NOTED: One of two things is probably true: Either 1) Someone else made the YouTube account in her name, which has sparked a flood of publicity on this incident. If that is the case, the woman from the video has actually become a victim of unsolicited attacks. But, 2) in my opinion the more plausible case, the YouTube account was made by the same woman in the video at an attempt to do some form of damage control. In that case, she has brought this attention on herself, albeit, she probably severely underestimated how bad the attention would be. I give these two options because well, there is no way to prove whatever the truth may be. In either case, it is bad news for her job search…]
