Spy vs Spy.

Used to be a time, when companies and countries employed "James Bond" style espionage agents to get the dirt on their competitors and find out when the latest nuclear device would be sold to the bad guys or when the latest high tech product would roll of the production line. They would carry concealed cameras in their cigarette lighters along with tape recorders hidden in the lapels of their custom made dinner suits. All to get the smallest amount of information about "the other guys" and what they were really up to. Not ethical but for some it seemed the only way to stay in front of the competition.

Nowadays, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook etc etc will get you 90% of the information you need and the rest is available when executives and politicians open their mouths without turning on their brains via Twitter, email or text messages.

Seems there is an epidemic of "foot in mouth" disease in the corporate world and it looks like escalating as executives fall over each other to deliver the latest gossip, latest share news and latest boardroom chatter, all to show who is in the know and who has the ear of the information hungry public. It used to be the occasional staff memo that leaked about the directors decision not to pay for the Christmas Party, but today that has taken a back seat to Tweets coming from within a board meeting all the way to LinkedIn faux pas by people like HP VP Scott McClellan tipping off the competition about the company's new cloud computing strategy.

Seems executives have found new ways to shoot themselves in the foot via the plethora of social media channels and at the same time put a whole raft of spies out of business. A Forrester Research survey showing 82 percent of 150 companies that monitor social media are primarily searching for competitive intelligence giving you a good idea why so many spies are now working in pizza parlours.

Everyone loves to be first with a story, it's human nature to want to impress your friends with a secret. Whereas it used to take days and weeks for stories to leak out, today a tweet can travel around the world in seconds and that makes it even more imperative for companies trading in sensitive information to have relevant social media strategies. Strategies that are aligned with the company culture so that everyone understands why there is a need to keep information safe and the consequences of leaks.

Steve Jobs had the culture right at Apple, for no matter how hard people tried, no one ever got the salient information for the latest technology releases until Steve hit the launch button. Sure there was speculation and gossip but Apple used that as marketing fodder and used its code of secrecy to build up expectations that delivered sales records such as the 1 million first day pre orders for the iPhone 4s.

We don't all operate in sensitive areas in our work environment but it behoves us to have some forethought before hitting the button on the latest bit of information tease or office gossip to consider what the consequences are and how they affect you and your brand. It's not about spy vs spy, it's about knowing your job and doing the right thing.