Tips & Tricks: Three Simple Ways to Keep Up With Social Media Trends

A few weeks ago, we wrote about maximizing your training experience. Part of that discussion covered the need for individuals to look for free sources of information. When you are looking to expand or narrow the scope of your open source Internet-based intelligence and investigations solutions, there are three main open sources you can use to help you make those decisions: social media content, blogs and news sources, and research.

Social Media Content

As social media content has become an integral part of online research, it becomes increasingly important to stay abreast of social media trends. One quick way to identify new sources of information is to look in content feeds. Many social media sites and applications connect with one another to push and pull data. As an example, we can use a Twitter feed. On Twitter, many people push Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Vine posts into their Twitter feeds. By watching these sources of information, you can easily identify new social media sites to incorporate into your investigations.

Blogs and News Sources

Often, blog and news-based content are some of the first places to see emerging trends in social media use. The best way to organize the influx of data is to be selective about the sources you use and to use an RSS reader like Feedly. Feedly allows users to subscribe to any written source with an RSS feed and to organize these sources into categories. When building out your reader, adding investigation, intelligence, and technology sources are greatly beneficial to keeping abreast of emerging trends. This information will not only help you identify new sources of information, it will also help you understand which types of individuals are using the technology and how they are using it.

Research

Similar to blogs and news sites, many research entities discuss the changes in the social media landscape. A major issue is that most research is scholarly in nature and costs money to access. However, there are two free research sources that provide excellent data: Pew Research Center and Nielsen. Both organizations study changes in technology usage and social media trends and release reports on a routine basis. You can even add their RSS feeds to your RSS reader. By keeping up with their findings, you can stay on pace with changes in society at large.

In the dynamic social media environment, investigators and analysts cannot afford to fall behind. By using these three sources, you can easily cultivate basic knowledge of the changing social media landscape. This allows you to update your practices, improve research and analysis, and add value for clients.

Cut Bad Hire Costs Using Employee Vetting

Hiring a new member of any team is no easy task. Every company sinks thousands of dollars into each new employee via hiring costs, wages, and training. However, not every employee ends up being the right fit for the job, resulting in a bad hire. According to a December 2012 CareerBuilder survey, these bad hires can cause the company many different issues ranging from poor work quality to workplace turmoil to customer dissatisfaction. Ensuring the individual is a right fit for the organization before bringing them in is essential to prevent both bad hiring costs and hires’ remorse.

Recently, we began writing pieces about employee vetting processes. First we wrote about The Importance of Employee Vetting from a security and image perspective. Then we wrote about The Importance Social Media Policies in the entire employment process from background checks to continuous evaluation. Now we’re going to tackle the issue of cutting your number of bad hires by enhancing your hiring process.

Calculating the Cost of a Bad Hire

To get a basic idea of how much a bad hire can financially cost your company, you can use ADP’s Bad Hire Calculator. Considering the data sources used to compile this tool are approximately 10 years old, the costs of bad hires have likely risen since the formula was created. However, these direct financial costs connected to the hiring process are not the only costs companies pay when they make a bad hire.

One major downside to a bad hire is the negative impact it has on the organization as a whole. Managers report that bad hires ultimately bring a negative influence to the business, cause a decrease in employee morale, and waste managers’ time with unnecessary supervision. When bad hires are let go, it also leaves vacancies in the company which burden the current staff with an extra workload and potentially result in lost opportunities during the replacement hiring cycle.

The Bad Hire Solution: Enhanced Background Checks

When you consider that the costs of a bad hire are in the thousands of dollars, running additional pre-employment screening methods on advanced rounds of candidates is a wise investment. Many employers report they are rushing to hire candidates and lack the intelligence crucial to making wise hiring decisions. You can improve your company’s hiring process by gaining the intelligence you need by creating a comprehensive employee screening solution for your final candidates that will capture the intangibles necessary for the position. There are two main solutions you should consider when enhancing your pre-screening process:

Resume & Application Vetting – With the current state of the economy, employers report that resume fraud is a persistent issue. In order to ensure your candidate was truthful in their resume and on their application, you can vet applications and resumes using a variety of techniques spanning from reference calls to online investigations. Social media sites like LinkedIn can assist with confirming the timeline individuals present on their resume, and you can build networks of coworkers and classmates to demonstrate personal connections to institutions. Finding inconsistencies on resumes can help reduce the amount of candidates in the final rounds of the hiring process and provide crucial intelligence to making the right decision.

Incorporating Social Media Data – It can provide a wealth of information about a candidate’s personality, allowing you to access a rich set of personal information not contained on resumes or applications. Social media can provide you with an inside glimpse into the lives of individuals ranging from their technical ability to their general demeanor and outside interests. It can also give you valuable data about how individuals interact with others and handle adversity and conflict. This data can be crucial to ensuring you hire someone whose personality will mesh with your current staff and can assist with intelligence for your final round of interviews.

While additional screening methods do bring additional costs, if you only run these methods on serious candidates rather than rushing to a decision, you can actually save your company thousands of dollars in bad hiring costs.

The Importance of Social Media Policies

Two days ago, a member of the team was browsing their Facebook feed and found a video of an acquaintance. This individual worked at a local restaurant, and the footage showed the individual and other members of the staff partying in the kitchen of the restaurant after hours. During the course of the video, employees were smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, and dancing to loud music. Within a few hours, the individual had removed the post and posted a status update lamenting about being pressured to remove the post.

If left unchecked, situations like these can lead to bad publicity for organizations and can even damage the company’s reputation. Two weeks ago, we wrote about The Importance of Employee Vetting and Continuous Evaluation. Not every organization has access to the same resources of a giant corporation to deal with the fallout of social media debacles. However, a strong social media policy is a massive step in the right direction. In order to have a robust policy, there are a few main things organizations need to do along the employee timeline.

Add Social Media to Your Background Check Procedures

Presently, many companies are adopting social media pre-employment screening as a part of their comprehensive background check process. This allows organizations to assess certain character traits vital to their organization and authenticate some resume and application-based data by using open source information on social media sites. It also helps assure due diligence on the part of employers during the hiring process. However, it is pertinent to fully disclose the scope of the background check process on authorization forms. The Society for Human Resource Management has posted a good example of a standard authorization form which may cover the scope of a comprehensive background check. It is important that companies routinely update these forms and their hiring procedures to remain Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) compliant.

Make a Sound Social Media Policy

In addition to incorporating social media to background check procedures, companies need to have a robust social media policy in place. Social media policies and monitoring procedures can help employers ensure that employees understand and acknowledge the full scope of workplace monitoring and that employers apply the policy equally using standardized procedures. This policy can cover a multitude of areas, including acceptable employee use, business use, and investigative procedures. While businesses need to respect employees’ right to organize, there is still a lot of leeway given to companies to create and enforce acceptable use policies. Attorney Heidi Carpenter wrote a great set of guidelines employers should use when utilizing social media in the workplace.

Follow Through

One major issue that arises is employers’ laxity regarding policies and procedures. Employers need to reinforce the policies by integrating them into the larger company culture. In order to ensure compliance with company regulations, businesses also need to routinely monitor their employees’ social media profiles and enforce the policies in a nondiscriminatory manner. In doing so, companies can help protect their reputation by hiring the right person and preventing situations from getting out of hand.

Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes and should not be construed as giving legal advice. For legal advice regarding social media policies and procedures, consult a legal professional.

Tips & Tricks: Three Easy Ways to Maximize Your Training Experience

Over the past few months, the team has been taking advantage of conferences happening around the state. At the center of all of these conferences were knowledgeable experts speaking and providing training. However, upon examining the materials our team brought back, we found the training was not always up-to-date and usually did not cover new, relevant practices or sources of information. Everything changes quickly on the Internet, whether it is changes in privacy law, new best practices, or the popularity of social media platforms. As investigators and researchers, it is important we budget our time and ensure we are spending our funds wisely to keep abreast of these changes.

Here are some quick easy tips on how to make the most of your training experience.

Vet the Trainer

Beware of self-proclaimed experts. Many individuals actually work in areas tangentially related to the subject of the training. Learning the perspective of the trainer can greatly inform you about what to expect to learn from a training session. In order to ensure the trainer has working knowledge of the subject, research their biographies appearing on websites, news sources, and social media profiles. You can also use information present on conference websites and in related training files (see below) to see if trainers cover material from an angle that matches your needs. Additionally, these sources can give you an idea of when the trainer worked in this field, whether or not they are using up-to-date information and techniques, and if they routinely update materials or simply recycle the same information.

Get Free Materials Using Internet Searches

Many trainers and conferences post documents and videos online which are readily available for use. All you have to do is leverage Internet-based searches to your advantage. Good places to start looking for information are on websites of companies and individuals which provide training, conference websites, and document and video sharing websites. However, sometimes the information is not always easy to find. As training materials are most often posted in .pdf, .ppt, and .pptx formats, using a filetype search on Google can often make all of the difference. While free materials are not always the best materials, finding this information before you purchase training sessions can save you time and money by allowing you to explore your options and vet trainers.

Plan and Engage

The true key to getting the most out of your training experience is planning and preparation. Before you schedule your training regimen, you have to set your goals and measurable outcomes. There are many questions you should ask yourself before you register:

• What skills do you want to work during the training period?
• How will this training help you enhance these skills?
• Are there others in your office that could also benefit from this kind of training?
• What is your expense budget?
• Do you want in-person or webinar training?
• What questions might you have for the trainer on this subject?

Once you find the answers to these questions, you will have a better idea of how you and others in your organization can benefit from training. To enhance your experience at the training session, be attentive, take notes, form questions as issues arise, and ask those questions to the trainer during the session.

Conclusion

In business, you cannot afford to waste time or money. We can use the same skills utilized during investigations to vet out the other areas of business we encounter on a routine basis. All business intelligence is built upon a solid foundation of relevant, up-to-date knowledge and clear objectives. Who you select to teach you these skills can make all of the difference to your long-term success.

Using Analysis to Curtail False Positives

Some of us ran into false positives while recently travelling. One person on our team was in the airport and set off the body scanner machine. He was sweaty from carrying a backpack through the line, so his scan showed a heat source emanating from his back. This prompted security to examine him to ensure was nothing hidden under his clothing. Without this analysis, he could have been put through a much lengthier security procedure because of his initial false positive.

Investigators seek to corroborate facts with other supporting facts or artifacts to validate or verify source data. When we talk about our services, many people want to know how we combat false positives. They want assurance the data we provide is legitimate and relevant to our investigations. In order to avoid false positives, we employ a few techniques to examine data.

Big Data vs. Smart Data

First and foremost, we employ data analysis. Currently, there is a large trend towards capturing big data for intelligence and business purposes. Most of our investigations deal with the big data pools originating from social media. During the primary stages of our work, we capture large amounts of data about the subject of interest. However, instead of taking big data at face value, we work in the business of “smart data” by using our data FUSION approach.

Our analysts scale the mountains of data to extract only the relevant pieces of data for analysis. As we discussed last week, this method has helped us in many investigations, especially while vetting employees. When we look at a subject and identify potentially relevant information, we dig deeper to see if something is an isolated incident, part of a larger pattern, or a false positive.

It is also extremely pertinent to vet information during event monitoring. For a training exercise, members of our team conducted real-time monitoring of Game 5 of the NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals. During the course of our monitoring, we uncovered a retweeted post of someone claiming they would kill themselves if the Heat lost.

Normally, this would be a high level threat to an event, so we vetted the post to ensure it was not a false positive. Upon completion of some cursory Internet-based research, we discovered there was no cause for concern. This post was simply a meme of something that was previously posted on Instagram. (Note: This post has since been removed by the original poster.)

Look Beyond the Person of Interest

We often think of data sources as originating from the person of interest. However, not everyone has a substantial Internet-based footprint, potentially because they have implemented privacy settings to hide information. To avoid missing pertinent information, we have to examine individuals other than the subject. In cases such as these, we have to identify content curated by their friends and family.  

During an employee vetting investigation, our subject used privacy settings to restrict access to his content. Previously, this employee had passed his background investigation with flying colors. On his application the employee stated he did not use drugs, and he passed a drug test. However, his friend posted a picture of “purple drank,” including the bottle of codeine cough syrup, and tagged the employee in the tweet. (Above is a screenshot we captured of a similar post.) This tweet indicated the possibility of a false positive during the initial application process and flagged the subject for further investigation into his habits.

Photos are Key

As we just discussed, photos can be key to unlocking an investigation. However, it is not possible to analyze photos using traditional big data means. Organizations often rely on textual analysis to flag content, but the text surrounding photos can be unrepresentative of the photo itself or use terms which are not currently being monitored. This means we have to look at the photos themselves to analyze content. Currently, there are no photo analysis programs which can conduct comprehensive contextual and photographic analysis for investigators. Analysts still have to use their skills to conduct an assessment of photographic evidence to ensure there are no false positives.

Conclusion

It is in everyone’s best interest for investigators to be thorough during investigations and report accurate findings. It is our responsibility to fully vet pertinent information before presenting it to our clients. Whenever a piece of potentially important information cannot be verified without further investigation, we must report it as a possibility instead of a fact. We give our customers more than just raw data; we give them analyzed information pertinent for decision making. Our investigations have real world consequences, and it is our duty to ensure we conduct and report them in an ethical manner.

The Importance of Employee Vetting and Continuous Evaluation

In the past few months, employee vetting has been at the center of the debates regarding two major public relations nightmares.

One is the case of Edward Snowden, the Booze Allen employee who exposed the NSA’s PRISM program. Some have claimed Snowden provided false information on his resume yet somehow still successfully passed his background check. Gaining access to the information available in this position is what both prompted Edward Snowden to apply for the position and allowed him to expose the government’s dealings in dark data. In response, legislators are attempting to overhaul the background check and security clearance process.

The other is the current murder investigation focusing on former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez. When Hernandez played at the University of Florida, he began displaying a propensity for violence and even took a photo of himself with a glock. Over the past few years, Hernandez has been connected to many violent encounters which have ultimately been publicized in light of the current investigation. In response to the investigation, the New England Patriots released Hernandez and lost approximately $250,000 on a jersey swap program that allowed fans to swap out their Hernandez jerseys for another player’s. It also spurred EA to remove Hernandez from two upcoming game releases.

In both cases, officials and commentators often cite the failure to properly assess the employee’s background and character prior to employing them as one of the major causes for these incidents. These incidents have brought bad publicity to both organizations which could ultimately prove to be costly and fundamentally damage their reputations. To avoid making this mistake, it is important that organizations embrace a holistic approach to employee vetting that goes beyond standard background check objectives.

Traditional Background Checks Aren’t Enough

Most organizations employ a standardized method of employee vetting. Companies traditionally use premade application forms and a prepackaged public records background checks to complete their evaluation of candidates. However, as we havepreviously covered, public records data can often be inaccurate or out of date. Similarly, these premade application forms may no longer capture the information vital to the needs of an organization. Standardized methods do not provide a comprehensive means of evaluation, especially for visible and sensitive positions which require a deeper dive into the daily lives of individuals.

Recently, our analysts worked two cases which clearly demonstrate this point. We were asked by a client to investigate two individuals who were hired for security-based positions. These positions required individuals to have a clean criminal record, be drug free, and refrain from having connections to potentially harmful influences, such as gangs. Both of these employees indicated refraining from substance abuse in their applications, passed their drug tests, and showed no history of legal troubles in their public records searches. However, their social media footprints revealed a much different story. One individual had a history of posting stashes of drugs and money on his social media accounts as well as discussing his marijuana smoking habits. The other had a brother who was affiliated with a local gang; his brother posted photos of himself both smoking marijuana and standing in a field of marijuana. These social media investigations revealed that both employees posed potential security threats.

Continuous Evaluation is Necessary

Once employees are on the job, organizations cannot afford to go without continuous evaluation. The circumstances in employees’ lives can change. New financial hardships may arise which make them more susceptible to bribery. Individuals can make new connections to individuals and organizations which put them at risk. People can get into legal trouble during the course of employment. No matter what new circumstances may arise, periodic reinvestigations, similar to those done for security clearances, are necessary to ensure compliance with company regulations and policies. These evaluations can help head off any potential incidents before they manifest themselves.

The Value Added

When organizations conduct tailored, thorough employee vetting investigations and continuous evaluation, they can ensure they are doing their due diligence. This can help them control their image by finding obvious sources of data which exist in social media. Social media data can identify red flags during the pre-screening process which can help organizations avoid marring their reputations by curtailing public relations debacles. In a world in which inordinate amounts of information are available to the public, it is important for employers to ensure they access the intelligence vital to mitigating organizational risk.

Building Your Tool Chest: Facebook's Graph Search

Building Your Tool Chest is a series devoted to the review and analysis of tools that assist with social media and open source research and analytics. 

For the past few months, a few of us at CES have been beta testing Facebook’s Graph Search feature. On July 8, 2013, Facebook announced the feature will soon be available to all Facebook users who have selected US English as their language. In order to prepare for the new search features, it is important to understand that Graph Search works quite differently than the current Facebook search feature.

Flexible Queries

Graph Search allows users to create flexible, complex queries for information. Instead of the current system in which users have to search for a term and then sort the data, users can now string together the relevant pieces of information to narrow search results. For instance, if you wanted to locate a jewelry store in Saint Augustine, Florida, you would simply type “Jewelry Stores in Saint Augustine, Florida.” The returned results only include jewelry stores which are located in Saint Augustine. The ease of using Graph Search allows us researchers to perform queries at a faster rate because we no longer have to take the extra step to run filters, and we can make more complicated searches than ever before. (See the Facebook Graph Search Cheat Sheet below.) However, not all search terms are easy to work with, and search results can be misleading.

Data Issues

Just because Graph Search says it returned all relevant search results, it does not necessarily mean all relevant results were accessible and/or properly categorized. There are a few major issues with search results in Facebook. First and foremost, users can choose to opt out of search results; this would exclude these users from the results even if they meet the criteria. Second, many users have privacy settings that prevent the system from returning their information in search results. Third, Facebook users do not necessarily complete their profile nor input their data in a uniform way. For instance, one person our St. Augustine office technically lived in New York, New York, but she identified her location on Facebook as her neighborhood, Harlem, New York, which would excluded her from New York, New York results. Finally, not all data fields or types of information are currently searchable, including posts. If the data you are searching for is embedded in posts, you will miss that information in your search.

Conclusion

Facebook’s Graph Search is a great tool. In the office, many of us used to complain about the difficulty we had searching for information inside of Facebook. Aside from the missing post search feature, the site has become much easier to use for locating information. Although Graph Search has some issues and requires users to learn the language before they can effectively search the system, it is ultimately a step forward for searching inside of Facebook.

In order to help you use Graph Search, we created a quick Graph Search Cheat Sheet.