Private investigators are being hired to trawl social-media websites.

Increasingly, corporations are hiring private investigators to trawl social-media sites for intelligence about competitors and to watch for insider leaks, product complaints and evidence of employee misconduct.

Investigators still use the old-fashioned ways -- snapping secret photos, slapping global positioning devices onto cars, tunneling through criminal files. But today's corporate sleuths spend more time mining the mass of information people put online about themselves.

"We use social media primarily to research people," said Avon Lake native Kristin Wenske, an investigative analyst in New York City with Corporate Resolutions Inc., an intelligence service. Wenske's clients are mostly private-equity firms and hedge funds, and before they plow hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into a company, they want to make sure its management team is clean.

Private investigator Tom Pavlish of Cleveland also has been assigned to check into chief executives of companies targeted for acquisition. In one case, the CEO had a favorable public image, but research unearthed sexual harassment accusations from two sources. Pavlish's client decided not to keep the executive when the deal closed because of the potential exposure and liability if the manager repeated his conduct.

"Remarkably, I've developed negative information even from LinkedIn references," Pavlish said.

More than 82 percent of companies use social media to find out information about their competitors, according to a Forrester Research survey last year of more than 150 companies.
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