social media monitoring Archives

Competitive Intelligence Investigations

In the business world, one could say with confidence that everyone is spying on everyone else. It’s a given and possibly more popular within certain industries. Competitive Intelligence initiatives in business is almost critical for the business owner. Whether the company is small, medium, or large, this type of intelligence gathering is important. Now with open source research options, it is so much more detailed than ever before. Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence, sometimes referred to as corporate intelligence, refers to the ability to gather, analyze, and use information collected on competitors, customers, and other market factors that contribute to a business’s competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence is important because it helps businesses understand their competitive environment and the opportunities and challenges it presents. Businesses analyze the information to create effective and efficient business practices. (Investopedia.com)

Social Media Listening — ***This is an example of coffee brands across three social media platforms. The example if provided by the software company Sprout Social as an example of what this type of research uncovers***

Types of Investigations

Marketing : One of the key reasons to conduct competitive intelligence is to gain a marketing advantage. One of the best ways is to use social media listening, which identifies the company’s online reputation. What do employees say about the company? What about customers? There are multiple software platforms out there that do exactly this as an ongoing part of their marketing plan. They can identify the effectiveness of the company’s digital and social media marketing, as you can see in the image above from Sprout Social. Sprinklr is another good example of this type of software. Another excellent option is to use mystery shopping. Our parent company, Ann Michaels & Associates, has conducted this type of research many times over the years. With a data base of over 300,000 evaluators we are able to find just the right person to perform the research. The shopper poses as a business looking for pricing on a service or product from the company’s competitor. This allows for a very up close and personal look at the competition’s sales techniques, customer service levels and pricing.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Research is key when looking at a company to purchase or merge with. Investigating their reputation, online and off is important. We have conducted open source research on not only the company, but also on individual stakeholders. This allows for a good overall impression.

This can be a good source of income for the Private Investigator. Be sure to list it on your website and talk to clients about it.

TikTok & the Gabby Petito Case

Gabby Petito, a young and beautiful Social Media Influencer, went on one travel adventure after another with fiancé Brian Laundrie. And thens suddenly, it all took a very dark turn. With Gabby Petito’s potential remains being recently identified in Wyoming, and fiancé Brian Laundrie still missing, this case has captivated the hearts of many across the country.

Questions as to why this happened to her and if it all could have been prevented are on the minds of many. If you search #gabbypetito through TikTok right now you will find more than 480 million people have viewed the videos associated with the hashtag. From TikTok influencers, to witnesses, real time video footage is being posted piecing together the evidence.

How TikTok Helped

Taking a closer look at the videos associated with #gabbypetito, I stumbled upon Miranda Baker’s TikTok channel, a key witness associated with the investigation. Miranda and her boyfriend picked up Brian Laundrie who was hitchhiking around the time of Gabby’s disappearance. She gave a statement to the FBI but afterwards documented her interactions with Brian through her TikTok account. Every video she posted goes into details about Brian, their location, and interaction. Every video has gone viral.

Another video created by Alyssa Rose, shows a YouTube video the couple had posted on one of their adventures. She pauses the YouTube video at marker 6:40, to focus in on a book that Brain Laundrie was reading in a hammock. As she zooms in, she discusses the book he was reading which is “The Annihilation”. This book is about groups of people exploring uncharted terrain that go missing. This particular book series follows four women.

A third video was from Riley Lively, a mom living in New Orleans. She took to her TikTok account and stated in the post, “Putting some of my investigation skills to good use!” In this video she discusses how through sleuthing through an app called “All Trails” she found Gabby Petito’s public account. This app allows you to search and follow other individuals and their hiking trails from around the world. Through this account Riley discovered all of the trails Gabby had saved. She begins to show the lists that Gabby had saved in her account. Many of these hiking trails saved could have been potential spots of where was had gone missing.

Critical Thinking

In OSINT we are taught about the techniques behind finding key pieces of data or evidence that is online. What isn’t always taught? How to apply critical thinking online. Growing your critical thinking skills is just as important in finding key information. Each one of these women took to TikTok and applied their critical thinking skills, piecing together social media content to an ongoing investigation.

The Takeaway

Each of the viral videos above teach us all something valuable! Culture, personality, details, and analysis. Miranda met with the FBI and provided a statement. She also was continuously working with the FBI while creating her video content. My mind immediately goes to the details she is discussing in each post, how she is processing what she witnessed in each video, and what are others saying about the content she is posting in the comments. Are there any additional witnesses there? Any other clues?

Alyssa Rose shared Gabby Petito’s Youtube video. Someone could have easily watched that video and not notice Brian in the hammock reading a book. She took the time to analyze a video that could have easily gone over the heads of many. The online personality of your subject matters. This is a great example of a small piece of information, showing us an insight to Brian Laundrie and his interest.

Riley Liley pieced together Gabby being an influencer, possibly having an account with the ever popular All Trails App and was right. She then was able to view Gabby’s public online account trail lists.

Leave no stone unturned. Think about their interests. If they have a large social media presence, there’s a chance they have apps they are tied to involving their interests.

When we think of social media research, or social media listening, culture is not something that immediately comes to mind. It is only when we begin to dig deeper and identify what our search parameters are, that we begin to understand the role culture plays. TikTok is a culture phenomenon that continues to evolve. It took on an entirely new form over the past two weeks with this case and will continue to do so.

You Shouldn’t Post That Here

By now we have all been schooled on what we shouldn’t post publicly in social media and why. In fact, you can read all over the internet why it is not a good idea to post your COVID vaccination card. It is also not a good idea to post about vacation plans.

When it comes to insurance fraud, a claimant’s social media posts plays an important role in any investigation. When someone is trying to claim an injury when there isn’t one, they need to lock down. You would think that the fraudster would be careful when they post publicly in social media. This is not always the case. In fact, recently we performed a deep web scan on a person suspected of insurance fraud. This was a workman’s comp case. A friend of the person actually cautioned him about a post he had recently added. She came right out and told him to be careful what he was posting. He answered her post by saying, “I not. I know how this works.” The original post was deleted, so we never knew what he posted to make her say that. It was suspicious however, that he left this exchange up on his profile page. In other words, he knew he might be watched in social media.

“Checking social media accounts has become one of the first things an insurance company or adjuster will do when you file a claim,” says Frank Darras an attorney from California who specializes in law suits against insurance companies.
Source:Auto Insurance Quote

What to Look For in Social Media

When we conduct a deep web scan, we start with the data points that we know to be true on an individual. Name, address, date of birth, employer, address and email addresses. They are all critical pieces of information because each one may hold an attachment to something online about our person of interest. It is also important in authentication. We need to be certain we have the right person.

Some tips we have learned along the way that may be of help to you include the following:

Check for multiple profiles. You just found your person of interest’s Facebook profile and you think you are done there. Not always so. Many people have secondary profiles. They may have set them up, forgot about them or they use each one for different things. Believe it or not, you may discover them by looking through their friends list. This is especially true in Facebook.
Tell a Story: Across all social media platforms, it is important to check the dates of posts. When you put them altogether, they can tell a story of a person’s activity. Just by combing through this information, you may find an inconsistency in their story or claim. Perhaps they are claiming to have taken a fall at work. Yet, a social media post may show them complaining about back pain days prior. Connecting the dots doesn’t mean they are automatically guilty, but can mean that a deeper investigation is needed, just to be sure.
Proof of legally attained social media posts: That is where meta data comes into play. If you find something in a person’s social media profile, you are going to want to extract that post and gather the intelligence behind it. Remember, screenshots can easily be altered.

Video is the Golden Child

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube are all examples of social media known for their videos. People post videos of all kinds of things there. Searching these platforms can be very lucrative because of it. Just remember, if you do find something important there, you will want to not only obtain the meta data, but extract the actual video to keep as evidence that is admissible in court.

Keep in mind that we can extract videos and photos as well as capture the meta data from the post. Timing is everything however, and what is here today can be gone tomorrow.

Can I Fire an Employee for This?

You are seated at your desk in the quiet of the morning, taking a sip of coffee, scrolling through your emails before the day begins. Suddenly, an email pops up with the subject line, “This isn’t good…” Your heart drops into the pit of your stomach yet quickly you click to open in hopes it isn’t anything too terribly bad. Your colleague has sent you a link to a public Facebook post with an employee speaking derogatorily towards your organization. To make matters worse, the post has gone viral. Sitting back into your chair, you have a thought trace through your head.

“Can I fire an employee for this?”

Your mind races and heads down that unforeseen rabbit hole with the next question.

“What are other employees potentially saying online about us?”

“What does our Social Media Policy state again? Do we even have a policy in place???”

“How will we be perceived by our customers after this viral post.”

“Is all of this even legal?”

To quickly answer a few of these questions upfront, yes, you can fire an employee for this, and it is legal.

Here is why:

According to Attorney Sidney L. Gold, not only do employers have the right to check the social media accounts of prospective and current employees, they also have the right to discipline or even fire a worker whose social media activity violates company policy.

This is all in accordance with state-by-state guidelines and your company or social media policy.

Social Media Policy

Oftentimes a social media policy is completely forgotten about until a PR disaster occurs. Pausing to protect your organization from such occurrences will allow future situations to quickly fizzle out. Creating a strong social media policy is essential. Openly discussing with your employees upfront will set expectations and provide everyone with the knowledge to succeed.

According to Digital Information World, about 51 percent of businesses have a social media policy, however, a certain percent of the employees of such offices, still find social media as a distraction during their work.
These seem like small statistics in terms of hours utilized but unfortunately for you, social media adds up to $6,422.50 lost in a year in the United States for one hour each day.

Social media will never stay the same and more than ever, even to sell, social media is being used by employees to gain new leads. It will always evolve and become something different over time. Revisiting your strategy will become essential in maintaining a strong policy.
Sprout Social provides some excellent ideas to help you maintain the health of your policy.

Fired for Posting

We see this all the time. Police officers, nurses, executives, actors, restaurant staff, and many more. No industry is left untouched when it comes to social media.

In our past blog, Fired for Posting on Social Media, Kathy discussed how one hospital in Wiltshire, England, didn’t share the sense of humor displayed by its employees when they took a few seconds out of their workday to lie down in strange places around their workplace, tagging it “The Lying Down on the Job Game.” When a few hospital employees decided to play along, they posted pictures of themselves lying around the hospital on the floor or even on the helipad. The higher ups decided if they had that much time on their hands, why not have more? They were all fired.

So, what can you do in your organization to avoid a PR catastrophe? There are few services offered that can easily eliminate your employee social media paint points.

3 Prevention Methods

Pre-Employment Screening
A social media hiring report is a great addition to a normal background check. Stay safe, compliant, and protected by hiring a third party to assist. FCRA compliant, we have trained specialists who obtain accurate, curated results, that are ethical and projected into a sleek and user-friendly report on your behalf.

Our Social Media Hiring Report (background check for employment) takes every factor into consideration to make sure that the clients we work for stay compliant on a federal and state level. We ensure that you never see what you shouldn’t see– the report turns up only relevant content that can be portrayed as negative and a detriment to the person’s employment with your company. When important content is identified, the report will only show those pieces of content. If nothing is found that falls into what can be legally obtained/considered when making hiring decisions, a “no pertinent information found” report is filed, meaning there is nothing of concern regarding the candidate.

Corporate Intelligence
Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC)‘s recent report, “23rdAnnual Global CEO Survey,” reveals that around 80% of CEOs have changed their online behavior due to potential risks. Corporate Espionage is alive and well and needs to be taken seriously as more and more employees overshare in social media. This allows for competitors to gain excellent insight into a vast array of information that would not otherwise be easily obtained. Banning employees from using social media at work has proven to be a nightmare and monitoring their social media internally has major privacy concerns. However, when approached correctly this type of monitoring is very valuable to any business of any size.

What makes this tricky, is that the company still has the responsibility to keep their employees safe, protect assets and data, mitigate risk for threats of fraud and monitoring reputation. High level executives travel to areas of the world that do not share the same security measures we do in the United States. Using geo-tagged software can show threats in areas ahead of time, alerting executives prior to arrival.

Employee Monitoring
Have an employee you are suspicious of not following your specific social media policy guidelines? Monitoring an employee for posts that are publicly available is something an employer has the right to do, especially If the employee is posting about work related misconduct, confidential company information or financial information.

Being proactive in enforcing your social media policy is key.

Reputation Management: Hire an Investigator

When you think of reputation management, what industry comes to mind? Perhaps you would think of a PR or Communication company. We have all seen commercials on TV around companies that can help you improve your image. They promise to get rid of those bad reviews, gather up good ones, and make you look like you are the best thing out there. But are they missing something? I believe they are. Here’s why.

Chief Reputation Officer

What many companies don’t think about is that reputation management is something that needs to happen proactively, not reactively. A recent Forbes article titled “Five Reasons Your Company Needs A Chief Reputation Officer” explained it best.

“Most companies, including your competitors, are usually only thinking deeply about reputation management after a crisis has hit. They react and try desperately to repair the damage. This is a huge missed opportunity because the damage done was often completely avoidable. Just like no sports team wins a game playing only defense, your company needs to play strong defense and come out with a strong offense.”
Forbes

Where the Private Investigator Comes In

When I speak to Private Investigators, I am amazed that many have not thought about this area as a vital way to grow their business. In my opinion, they should be considered to be part of any good reputation management program or team. In our digital world, they will be able to determine exactly what needs to be monitored and how. After all, they do this type of investigating all the time.

Family law, infidelity cases and divorce depositions have been mainstream avenues for revenue for decades. Some of the PI’s love them, and some avoid them like the plaque. Those that avoid them do so because of the amount of work vs. the amount of compensation.

Promote your business as a firm that covers Corporate Reputation Management services. By doing so, you are in some ways, investigating for a company in some of the same ways you would be investigating for a cheating spouse. Only better, because the work is proactive VS. reactive. If you catch an issue that a corporation has online before it goes viral, you have saved the day.

Back in June, we wrote about Employee fraud and COVID19. In that post, we cited a Fortune 500 company’s loss of over $100,000.00 because of a plant shut down due to a dishonest employee. It happens more than we know.

Proactive Steps to Take

As a service offering, it is smart to offer a corporate client a deep web scan on their business. What does their online profile reveal? Some things to consider:

Reviews are obvious, but many people think of them as Yelp, Google, and Trip Advisor. They are the biggies, but there is much more out there.

2. Location based Monitoring: Does the company have more than one location globally? By creating a virtual fence around physical locations, an added security level is created for any violent social media mentions in the area. Additionally, automatically pull in any negative keywords for reputation management.

3. Employee Revenge. As more and more employees are laid off because of our current pandemic situation, some are understanding and some are not. It is human nature. Just today, I read a post in LinkedIn about a disgruntled employee telling everyone how she was let go from a major company. She went on to say that she mistakenly placed all of “who she was” around this position for the past 8 years and how this was a major life mistake. Her post gained a lot of views and encouraging comments, as it should. However, think about the company’s name there. Most people are left with the impression that the company did something wrong to her. We don’t know the full story, but it can still leave a lasting impression. Glassdoor is a website where current and former employees anonymously review companies. I will bet many don’t even know about that one site alone.

See the possibilities yet? Do you think in today’s online world, this could be something your firm is capable of doing? Email me if you would like to kick around the idea for your firm.