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. 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 gotten in the past by things like surveillance," said Kroll Senior Managing Director Rich Plansky.
In a Forrester Research survey last year of more than 150 companies that monitor social media, more than 82 percent 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.
At Kroll 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."
When one client asked Kroll to find out 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.