Using Social Media to Protect Your Business

Posted: August 21st, 2015

By Patrick O'Neil

Patrick O'Neil is an Executive Vice President with The Radiant Group, a premier provider of intelligence and technical services to government and corporate customers, and the former Director for Analysis at the Open Source Center.

Social media can be a valuable resource for companies, especially those with dispersed operations, by providing situational awareness, work force and facility protection, and advanced warning of potential disruptions. Harnessing social media to advance these objectives is relatively easy with the right tools, targeted collection, and analytic expertise.

Social media, even in remote corners of the world where they may be scarcer, is a valuable input into business operations. Monitoring social media can provide critical information to anticipate opportunities and to assess risks to employees, facilities, output, and markets. They can surface indicators of change and reveal the plans and intentions of groups that might adversely affect business, including competitors, suppliers, and, potentially, protestors or terrorists. And often social media can provide this information faster than ubiquitous traditional media sources.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+