Hewlett-Packard Co Vice-president Scott McClellan gave away more than his job status when he mentioned the computer maker’s new web-storage initiative in his profile on LinkedIn Corp, a professional-networking site.
McClellan inadvertently tipped off competitors earlier this year to previously undisclosed details of Hewlett-Packard’s cloud-computing services. The information was later removed, though not before rivals got a look at the plans.
As workers put more information about their lives online through status updates, location check-ins and resume changes, employers are more at risk of competitors watching their every move. Investigators at Kroll Inc, the 40-year-old corporate sleuthing pioneer, are known for scanning deleted computer files and monitoring surveillance cameras to help large companies uncover rivals’ secrets. Now they’re trawling the social web.
“Social media has become a much more efficient way of getting information that could only be secured in the past by things like surveillance,” said Kroll Senior Managing Director Rich Plansky.
In a Forrester Research survey of more than 150 companies that monitor social media last year, about 82 per cent said they use this data for competitive intelligence—the most cited reason for the monitoring. With good reason: A single insider’s Twitter Inc post can be more valuable than a stack of analysts’ research.
“Competitors obviously watch each other in social media, just as they have historically monitored each other in the media and in public presentations,” said Shel Israel, an author and consultant on online networks. “Social media is a new data-abundant source that is here to stay.”
PROWLING SOCIAL SITES
Corporate investigators, including Kroll, Nardello & Co and Risk Solutions & Investigations, are prowling social sites for oversharing insiders like McClellan. Michael Thacker, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, declined to comment on the matter.
At Kroll, a division of Falls Church, Virginia-based Altegrity Inc, social sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Inc aid in investigations of employee misconduct, background checks and suspected cases of data breach.
“Who a person’s friends are, what bars they go to, which groups they are interested in, what they look like,” Plansky said. “All of those information sources are a potential gold mine for us in developing intelligence for our clients.”
PLAY-BY-PLAY
When one client asked Kroll to find how a potential acquisition target got leaked to a competitor, investigators found a series of social media posts in which a member of the client’s mergers-and-acquisitions team publicly discussed doing diligence on a company in a specific city.
“Twitter can give you a play-by-play about a person’s activities,” Plansky said. “‘A lot of these posts are time-and date-stamped.”
For another client, Kroll began building a case against a fired executive by seeing whom in his LinkedIn network he might be sharing trade secrets with, a violation of his termination contract. Plansky declined to name any of Kroll’s customers.
Sean Garrett, a spokesman for Twitter, said in an e-mail that posts made on Twitter are publicly available. Erin O’Harra, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, declined to comment.
