Tap the Social Media Stream for Competitors' Secrets

CIO — Ten years ago, Logicalis, a systems integrator, would have needed a wiretap to overhear the grumblings of a competitor's dissatisfied customer or prospect. But when a Logicalis sales representative stumbled across a LinkedIn status update revealing an individual's frustration with a rival company's cloud service, he knew just what to do.

"The person was complaining because a cloud services provider had contacted them and asked them to invest in a cloud solution," recalls Lisa Dreher, vice president of marketing at Logicalis, in Farmington Hills, Mich. However, when the person discovered that the vendor actually wasn't able to offer the right solution, he turned to LinkedIn to voice his "frustration," which, according to Dreher, "was a good thing because we actually had the cloud solution they needed. So our sales rep was able to say, 'We can help you with that.'" In the end, Logicalis sold the individual its own cloud service.

For several years now, companies have been using tools such as HootSuite and Radian 6 to monitor what people say about them in social media. The new twist is that more and more companies are tapping the social media stream to learn highly valuable information about rival businesses, says Richard Plansky, senior managing director at Kroll, a New York-based risk consulting company that offers corporate intelligence programs.

"Social media moves a large portion of what used to be private information into the public sphere," says Plansky. "And that makes it much easier to gather information about companies' activities that we used to need surveillance to learn. Now we can do it from our desktops."

Valuable Bits

Product specifications, product testing, promotional offers, financial data, recruitment efforts, layoffs, industry demographics, customer satisfaction levels are just some of the details that can be gleaned from Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds and blog postings.

"A lot of the data is innocuous in little chunks but when combined with lots of other teeny, tiny pieces of information it gives you a real big window into a company," says Shane MacDougall, a partner at Tactical Intelligence, a Canadian consultancy.

But social media-engaged employees aren't the only ones spilling secrets. "Lots of companies are very worried about what their employees are leaking, but we invariably find out that some of the most critical information that's being leaked is by the companies themselves in the form of sales documents, conference presentations and improperly secured data on a company's own website," warns MacDougall.

Take, for example, a startup CEO who posted a question on Quora, a collaborative question-and-answer site, regarding a rival's revenue model. The CEO, who asked to remain anonymous, wanted to know how one of his key competitors makes money, after failing to find that information online. Within days, "the head of business development at the company actually answered my question -- not knowing that I was a competitor," marvels the startup's CEO.

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