Social Media Research 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.

Using Reverse Image in Your OSINT Research

When conducting OSINT research, don’t forget image searches, as they can reveal quite a bit. We have all heard the saying, ” A picture is worth a thousand words.” We understand its meaning and know it to be very true. However, when it comes to OSINT research, sometimes what is in the background of a picture is worth a million words!

A recent Netflix show comes to mind as I write this blog post. Have you seen The Tiger King yet? Some people can watch it, while others I have heard just can’t get through the series. At any rate, one thing I recall very well is how several social media posts worked in the favor of an investigation to find the fugitives who were on the run. The main character (who was on the run) and his husband posted many social media photos trying to make it look like they were in Mexico. Upon further attention, it was noticed that the background of the images made it very clear that they were indeed in Florida. Certain identifying clues led law enforcement to their exact location.

The more photos found when using OSINT research the better. Bing has an excellent built in option.

Bing’s Reverse Images

Bing: Bing search engine has an image search that allows an upload of an image in the same way Google Image Search does. Below you will see what is produced when we uploaded the image on the left. All the images on the right are instantly populated.

Bing Reverse Image how to — Normal image search reveals a good amount of results.

If nothing comes up, try the cropping the image using the “visual search”. Let’s say we want to focus on one area of the image. The visual search allows you to crop the image in a way that may reveal different results.

Bing Visual Image as an additional search method. — Visual Image

You can see the difference between the two. This can be very helpful when you have a picture of someone in a public place. You may not be able to pinpoint exactly where they are. Using this Bing feature may produce more photos with an exact location.

Pinterest Image Search

Log into your Pinterest account.
Click on any pin in your home feed (or on any profile or board).
Click the icon in the bottom-right corner of the pinned image.

How Pinterest does search of photos — From Search Engine Journal

Simply click on the visual search icon, you can see everything else in Pinterest that is similar.

Instagram Has Over 95 Million Photos Uploaded Daily.

One of our recent blog posts discussed just how many photos are in the social media platform and how it can be used in investigation. In fact, we were recently able to help a client by identifying a person was at Walt Disney when they were trying to locate him to serve papers. It can be quite valuable!

Facial Recognition Apps

In the near future, facial recognition apps may be more readily available. Especially if companies like Clear AI has anything to say about it. An app that lets you identify anyone from a photo, and it is currently being used by law enforcement. Their mission, as stated on their website is:

Clearview AI is a new research tool used by law enforcement agencies to identify perpetrators and victims of crimes.

Clearview AI’s technology has helped law enforcement track down hundreds of at-large criminals, including pedophiles, terrorists and sex traffickers. It is also used to help exonerate the innocent and identify the victims of crimes including child sex abuse and financial fraud.

Using Clearview AI, law enforcement is able to catch the most dangerous criminals, solve the toughest cold cases and make communities safer, especially the most vulnerable among us.

What trick of the trade do you use?

OSINT Research: The Devil’s in the Details

For those unfamiliar with the term OSINT Research, it is explained this way by Wikipedia

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of information that is gathered from public, or open, sources.^[2] OSINT is primarily used in national security, law enforcement, and business intelligence functions and is of value to analysts who use non-sensitive intelligence in answering classified, unclassified, or proprietary intelligence requirements across the previous intelligence disciplines.

OSINT sources can be divided up into six different categories of information flow

Media, print newspapers, magazines, radio, and television from across and between countries.
Internet, online publications, blogs, discussion groups, citizen media (i.e. – cell phone videos, and user created content), YouTube, and other social media websites (i.e. – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). This source also outpaces a variety of other sources due to its timeliness and ease of access.
Public Government Data, public government reports, budgets, hearings, telephone directories, press conferences, websites, and speeches. Although this source comes from an official source they are publicly accessible and may be used openly and freely.
Professional and Academic Publications, information acquired from journals, conferences, symposia, academic papers, dissertations, and theses.
Commercial Data, commercial imagery, financial and industrial assessments, and databases.
Grey literature, technical reports, preprints, patents, working papers, business documents, unpublished works, and newsletters.

OSINT Resources Reveal the Details From the Deep Web

Many times our clients want to better understand the difference between a social media scan and a deep web scan. Taking a close look at the image above explains a lot and kind of surprises most people in terms of the data on the web that is openly available.

eChatter Case Study Examples of Deep Web Details

Recently, we were trying to find out whether a POI (person of interest) was married. He had no Facebook clues other than he was in a relationship. After conducting a deep web scan we found a local newspaper article in which he was named along with “his wife”. The wife chose to keep her maiden name.
A deep scan was ordered by a client to determine what happened to a deceased person’s body. We found an association letter that was published online indicating the person was cremated and buried at sea.
A client needed to know if their POI had any business affiliations that wasn’t disclosed in a divorce settlement. After a deep scan was conducted, we located quite a few businesses tied to the POI.

Does it always work out this way? Not at all. Mainly because some people are much better at hiding this than others or because they were advised to delete everything online by advice of counsel. However, these are the kind of details OSINT research is all about. You will not find this in a Google search.