Janet Aronica

I’ve heard lately that among HR managers, Googling the names of potential employees is all the rage. (http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/10/6-tools-to-monitor-your-online.html). As a soon-to-be college graduate and potential employee extraordinaire, I’m very interested in this.

I didn’t care that much about Googling my name until recently. In my opinion, there are millions of more interesting things to Google than “Janet Aronica.”

I did this back in November, receiving the expected results: social media accounts, newspaper articles from my journalism days, swimming competition results, running times – evidence of an overly-involved life full of physical activity and extracurricular achievement. But something new, to my horror and annoyance, popped up as about the fifth results on Google.

Let’s back up to briefly discuss the computer virus I got back in October. The HPV of computer bugs, if you will. This thing got into my Fisher email account and sent out tens of thousands of spam emails to everyone all across the planet. These spam emails basically said:

“Hi my name is Mrs. Janet Aronica. You’ve won a bagillion quadzillion dollars. Please just send me your bank account number and pin so I can deposit the money in your account.”

I know…

One of these emails got to author Jane Green. She blogged about it, talking all about how crazy this Mrs. Janet Aronica was for trying to scam people. My name was all over the post and it was kind of embarrassing.

I responded to the post with a comment that in so many words explained:

“Hi, I’m Janet Aronica. There is no Mrs. Janet Aronica. I had a virus in my email account and that is why you got this email. Sorry for any inconveinence that the email caused. I don’t want anything to do with your bank information, but I do want a job when I graduate. This post makes me look like a jerk, and I don’t want HR managers to think that if they Google my name and see this. Please delete this post.”

It’s crisis communication, duh.

Within 15 minutes she, or somebody, got back to me with a sincere apology and a notification that she deleted the post. Then she mailed me a copy of her book as an “I’m sorry” gift.

Honestly, that’s an even better response than I could’ve asked for. I really respected it. That’s PR.

There was some more stuff posted on other sites regarding these scam emails. I’m still trying to contact people and clean up the situation so I don’t look like a money-swindling creepo.

How much do I care what people think about me? How important is this online reputation? It’s tough to explain. The people that know me best – the people I care about most – know where these emails came from. Quite frankly, they think it’s another hilarious example of Janet struggling with computers, and life. (Hey, I earned the nickname Struggles somehow.) But the people who know me well enough to know that aren’t the HR managers who could hire me somewhere down the line.

In conclusion, the answer is yes, I do care about my online reputation. And when it comes to looking good for the HR people, I have to be my own PR person.

So until next time…

Take a nap. Hug somebody. Google your name. -JNA