Dealmaking Disrupted: The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation

While social media has had profound effects in many realms, the theory and practice of negotiation have remained relatively untouched by this potent phenomenon. Both in the field and in the academy, a surprising lack of clarity exists with respect to the roles and effects of social media in negotiation: the right conceptual categories, best practices, common pitfalls, ethical frameworks, as well as the full range of relevant tools and methodologies. We have written this article as an early attempt to remedy some of these gaps.

To take a salient example from practice, social media can now be used as a powerful, if unorthodox, device to directly intervene in talks from afar—though without a clear‐eyed understanding of its impact. For instance, U.S. President Donald Trump famously tweeted (Trump 2017): “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man” and “Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!” Later, as the nuclear negotiations sputtered on, Trump tweeted (Trump 2019) to North Korea’s leader with an urgent message: “Mr. Chairman… you should act quickly to get the deal done. See you soon!”

More broadly, one of us recently asked former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry whether social media in negotiation now functions as a “first‐order” factor and Kerry immediately affirmed that indeed this is the case (Belfer Center 2020). Mentioning his negotiations to normalize relations with Cuba as well as to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Kerry warned that “you want to try to stay away from [social media]” and that it has “driven negotiations into a much more secret, private track.” (Elsewhere in this issue, our colleagues Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook and Alvaro Renedo Zalba offer further examples and analysis of how social media is shaping daily diplomatic dealmaking.)

What is true for public officials in today’s online era is equally the case for many business negotiators, despite the extent to which social media has disrupted other organizational functions such as marketing (Alalwan et al. 2017), sales (Cespedes 2015), branding (Holt 2016), “corporate diplomacy” (Henisz 2014), and elsewhere (Quesenberry 2016). While advising private clients on their most challenging negotiations, we have repeatedly seen how powerfully social media can influence the outcome—in both welcome and unwelcome ways—especially for negotiations that are squarely in the public eye. What is less clear is how, and how best, to harness the power of this digital phenomenon—“offensively” as well as “defensively”—to improve negotiated outcomes.

When we began exploring the literature with respect to social media’s roles in negotiation and conflict resolution, we quickly observed a common limitation of disciplines trying to come to grips with a fundamental disruption: viewing digital mainly as another channel, and focusing on how existing approaches function in the new medium—rather than asking how it might more fundamentally affect the process.

Despite limitations, work in this vein can nonetheless be quite helpful. For practical advice on negotiating virtually, see, for example, Hal Movius’s recent Harvard Business Review piece “How to Negotiate — Virtually” (Movius 2020), Deepak Malhotra’s video on “How to Negotiate on Zoom” (Malhotra 2020), or Katia Tieleman’s advice on negotiating via Zoom or Teams (Tieleman 2020). These and similar practitioner pieces (e.g., Shonk 2020; Voss 2020) summarize and elaborate on the implications of decades of research that compares face‐to‐face interactions with communication over different media such as e‐mail, telephone, and video. (For more scholarly analyses and summaries, see, e.g., Moore et al. 1999; Purdy, Nye, and Balakrishnan 2000; McGinn and Croson 2004; Giordano et al. 2009; Kim and Dindia 2011; Schroeder, Kardas, and Epley 2017). Typical topics include comparisons on how much verbal and nonverbal information is transmitted, online versus offline self‐disclosure, effects on relationship and trust‐building, attention spans, and cognitive loads, as well as technical issues such as the ability to leverage off‐screen, sidebar communications on Zoom by simultaneously using separate channels such as FaceTime or Slack.

As we dug into exisiting literature on the subject, we asked several prominent negotiation researchers for help identifying where else we might turn for deeper research or insights into the role of social media in negotiation. To our surprise, while virtually all scholars we queried agreed as to the importance of the topic, and several offered useful suggestions such as those we cited above,^1. little confidence was expressed that more fundamental work had been done in this area—a puzzle, given social media’s growing significance across so many other disciplines. Typical responses to our queries included: “Good question. I can’t think of anything that is relevant…” or “Great dissertation topic!” So we put together a panel of academics and practitioners on this topic at a May 2020 Program on Negotiation Working Conference on AI, Technology, and Negotiation initially organized by Michael Wheeler (Sebenius et al. 2020), which has helped form the intellectual underpinnings of this article.

A note is in order with regard to what, precisely, we mean by “social media”—as well as some of the other terms we will use throughout this article. Across each of the use cases we will discuss, the term “social media” not only includes the major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, but can also draw on less well known or less immediately obvious sources such as Reddit, Glassdoor, 4Chan, Pinterest, Yelp, and many other forums, channels, discussion groups, and platforms that often prove invaluable sources of data and information.

When we make reference to the “analytical tools” that help inform this kind of work, we are referring to a broad—and ever‐changing—set of social media “listening” dashboards, various public or paid databases, graphing software, and other tools across the social media intelligence industry. None of these is designed specifically for negotiations, but each can be adapted with some effort and skill by knowledgeable users for negotiation‐related purposes. We also make reference in several places to methodologies and findings borrowed from the field of “Open Source Intelligence,” a discipline that emerged among national security and human rights researchers such as Bellingcat (2020), using publicly sourced data to develop insights, inform strategy, and uncover wrongs around the globe. We offer more detailed examination of the tools, methodologies, and data sources toward the end of this article.

We take a much more comprehensive view of “negotiation” than the traditional, at‐the‐table interpersonal and tactical interplay that characterizes common approaches in the field—because a more expansive perspective on the dealmaking process is necessary to fully understand the potential roles social media can play.

Indeed, if one reads many textbooks and articles on negotiation, one could be forgiven for thinking that the negotiation process primarily happens at the table and is mainly a matter of psychology and interpersonal interaction: establishing connection and trust, reading the other side(s) to understand interests, deciding on whether to make the first offer, meeting objections, inventing creative options, using various techniques to close the deal, and so on.

Although dealmaking may appear self‐contained and limited to the primary negotiators “at the table,” the reality is almost always more porous and involves other potentially influential parties whose actions “away from the table” can powerfully influence the process. These often include others from within the counterpart’s organization, from direct managers and other affected divisions to CEOs and board members for important deals. Most negotiators also listen to outsiders as well, such as legal and financial advisors, regulators, unions, and financial stakeholders, alongside a range of other sources. In this regard, social media can be a tremendous aid in the discovery, mapping, and characterization of this wider set of relevant parties. In many cases, it may help understand the actual decision process—formal and informal—into which the negotiation is embedded and how best to influence that process toward reaching a target agreement.

In taking this more expansive perspective, we borrow heavily from the “3D Negotiation” approach developed by Lax and Sebenius (e.g., 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2012). This framework analyzes negotiation in terms of three distinct but intersecting dimensions: the first dimension or “1D,” the “at‐the‐table” interpersonal tactics focused on people and process; the second dimension or “2D,” the type of deal design “on the drawing board” that helps to create sustainable, value‐creating agreements; and the third dimension or “3D,” encompassing setup moves “away from the table” that help to put in place a favorable scope, sequence, and overall environment conducive to reaching one’s target deal.

Exploring how social media can play powerful roles within the 3D framework has proved quite valuable in our private negotiation advisory practice and research alike. In the first dimension (“tactics”), we have found that analyzing social media can help negotiators understand their direct counterparts (including interests, perceptions, relationships, networks, and so forth) and the people who influence them—all of which can help to make negotiators more effective “at the table.” In the second dimension (“deal design”), our research shows how social media data can help design value‐creating deals “on the drawing board” by uncovering the parties’ true interests that suggest high value/low cost options. Finally, in the third dimension (“setup”), we have seen how social media can help to identify vital constituencies and reach out “away from the table” to mobilize supporters and neutralize opponents in order to influence the deal landscape in a favorable direction.

In our May 2020 Program on Negotiation Working Conference (Sebenius et al. 2020), we identified four key ways that social media can greatly enhance an overall negotiation strategy: by helping to learn, to influence, to mobilize, and to neutralize. We have found this simple “LIMN” model quite helpful in informing our own work advising private clients, as well as analyzing the case studies we have reviewed in our research.^2.

The remainder of this article will employ a “3D” analytic lens to derive key insights from a set of case studies that illustrates the LIMN framework. We will then review some useful analytic tools and valuable sources of data, and finally conclude with future research and practical advice needed to help guide strategic decisions in this area. Before analyzing the cases, however, we make several observations on ethical and privacy concerns given their special importance where negotiators consider incorporating social media into their approach.

Negotiation in the pre‐Internet era posed knotty ethical challenges associated with common tactics such as lying, manipulative persuasion, coercion moves, and the like (e.g., Lax and Sebenius 1986; Menkel‐Meadow and Wheeler 2004). Such challenges only increase with digital options such that no discussion of social media and negotiation should occur without addressing ethical and privacy concerns (see, e.g., Barrett‐Maitland and Lynch 2019 or Ess 2020). When it comes to the ethical boundaries that should be observed in this domain, it is helpful to keep in mind the distinction between negotiation‐related actions that are best avoided simply because they may backfire or cause reputational damage, and those that are intrinsically wrong and should not be undertaken even with little or no risk of adverse consequences or of “getting caught.”

A simple admonition to follow the law does not suffice for such a rapidly evolving sphere. When it comes to negotiating in the midst of a digital revolution, regulations simply have not kept pace with the rapidly expanding set of tactics, data sources, and potential for malfeasance and harm from the misuse of social media. For example, while the European Union’s “GDPR” (General Data Protection Regulation—see EU 2020) might function as a bare‐bones minimum, such limited legal frameworks around known issues like privacy cannot provide a comprehensive guide for adapting to new situations and evaluating potential tactics online. Nevertheless, in some cases firms have been subject to lawsuits over behavior such as spreading entirely unfounded allegations about a competitor (Burkitt 2015).

Beyond (frequently limited) legal ramifications from unethical practices on social media, an additional level of what we might refer to as “instrumental” ethical boundaries should remain top of mind for negotiators seeking to use social media to shape deals in practice. As firms begin exploring opportunities to exert influence or shape discourse online, examples abound of such efforts backfiring after being exposed to public or media scrutiny: Amazon has faced severe social media backlash over its “fulfillment center ambassadors” program (BBC 2019), while global consulting firm FTI has come under fire after being accused of “astroturfing,” or running deceptive influence campaigns designed to appear like grassroots online support for fossil‐fuel initiatives (Tabuchi 2020).

Indeed, Song et al. (2017) studied deceptive marketing and slanderous practices online, and found that “while both firms suffered, the damage to the offending firm (which spread fake news to cause the crisis) was more detrimental, in terms of advertising effectiveness and negative news publicity, than that to the victim firm (which suffered from the false claim).” In short, ethical considerations aside, foul play online simply may not pay.

Yet as technology advances and such techniques become increasingly democratized, cheaper, and more accessible to businesses, activists, and nefarious or opportunistic actors of all stripes, it will become increasingly inevitable that negotiators face difficult ethical decisions that require more careful consideration beyond instrumental factors alone. In 2019, the Insikt Group studied the prevalence of disinformation‐as‐a‐service on Russian‐speaking underground forums, and commissioned two firms to generate damaging narratives across the web—in less than a month for only a few thousand dollars (Insikt 2019). Clearly, the availability of relatively inexpensive, increasingly sophisticated influence operations and other morally ambiguous services that "work" for the perpetrators will pose an urgent ethical issue for negotiators in the very near future.

Although there has been and will continue to be an explosion in the number and sophistication of nefarious tactics available online, in many ways the ethical strictures that have guided negotiators for decades remain unchanged in this new era of information revolution. Just as negotiators in past eras should refrain from hiring private investigators to dig through the trash of their counterparts, bribing coworkers on the other side for information, bugging their offices, or monitoring the movement of their underage children in an effort to suss out valuable insights, so privacy and ethical considerations must remain at the forefront of negotiators’ minds even as new categories of potentially suspect tactics emerge.

In our view, minimal ethical considerations should ensure that information gleaned through social media should never derive from hacking or be used to embarrass or blackmail, to perpetrate fraud, or to foster or take advantage of identity theft. In particular, given the clear potential for social media to spread misinformation, ethical negotiators must take special care to avoid directly or indirectly propagating lies. Similarly, there may be potential allies, vendors, consultants, supporters, or other relevant parties whose support might prove helpful in a deal situation, yet whose moral code or reputation remains suspect or toxic enough to warrant avoiding despite potential benefits. In short, although the technological possibilities may expand and the medium may shift, the advent of the digital age and the availability of open‐source information via social media do not offer excuses to lose sight of one’s personal moral compass or let one’s organizational code of conduct fall by the wayside. As we plumb the case studies that follow, ethical and privacy concerns should always be kept in mind both for intrinsic and instrumental reasons.

Through the following case studies, we explore how social media’s role in negotiation can play out in practice. Our first case study—involving a legal cannabis business and the small‐town politics of its New England home—will help illustrate the use of social media across all three dimensions of negotiation: setup, deal design, and tactics. Instead of being limited to approaches like talking to counterparties or asking local advisors about key individuals, exploring data made publicly available online can efficiently uncover a much broader and richer set of information. Such open‐source intelligence might reveal interests and networks, alongside crucial patterns of information flow, influence, deference, and antagonism. Ultimately this can inform winning strategies including by guiding “standard” negotiation tactics in the first dimension: connecting with whom, how, with what messages to best influence counterparts and their constituencies. Throughout this case study, we will also be looking at how this kind of social media research and analysis could have been used to enhance party mapping by identifying proximate, indirect, or distant interests and more peripheral parties who might have been helpfully recruited or involved in shaping the process away from the table (in the third dimension of negotiation).

In our second case study, we will highlight a successful early example of using social media as a fast, cheap, and potentially wide‐reaching communications tool, enormously helpful in facilitating the “away from the table” moves that can help create a favorable deal landscape. We will focus on the lessons our co‐author, Paul Levy, learned as he managed to fend off a potentially damaging, multimillion‐dollar unionization drive at the Boston‐area teaching hospital he led—armed with little more than his own personal blog, Running A Hospital (Levy 2006).

Next, we will remain focused in the “third dimension,” but contrast Levy’s success with a more recent, high‐profile negotiation failure—Amazon’s disastrous bid for a second headquarters location in New York City, which was derailed by deal opponents highly mobilized on social media, with supporters largely standing idle online. Finally, we will present a few short additional case studies—including hypothetical, synthesized, and real‐world examples—that further illustrate the key use cases for social media that we have uncovered in our research and advisory practice.

In our first example, a legal cannabis company we have dubbed Canna Productions sought to negotiate with the people of a small Massachusetts town that we will call Oldhaven, which had recently passed a referendum that banned all marijuana businesses (otherwise legal in the state)—including the firm’s recently built $10m production facility in the local industrial district.

(NOTE: All aspects of this case have previously been made public in several forums, but out of a concern for privacy we have proactively blinded the name of the town alongside all key parties, individuals, and other identifying details.)

A quiet corporate citizen prior to this incident, Canna Productions had mostly kept a low profile in town, investing its limited capital in a warehouse operation focused on medical marijuana while working privately to establish good personal relationships with the police chief, city council leadership, and other local government figures. When a town referendum was first proposed following a new provision in state‐level legislation to legalize recreational cannabis, it focused solely on retail cannabis outlets—leaving the firm’s production‐only facility untouched. But after a secretive, last‐minute change to its wording, the final referendum would have forced the start‐up company into a financially ruinous move out of town, given ruinous costs and almost insurmountable regulatory siting obstacles it would likely face elsewhere.

Facing imminent bankruptcy, the company’s founder, Adam Kingston, initially engaged the services of a well‐regarded outside firm, which attempted an aggressive PR campaign that backfired dramatically after being perceived as overly slick and out of touch with the tight‐knit community’s values, driving local voters to pass the reworded referendum (and label Kingston with an unflattering nickname). In desperation and with his reputation in tatters, Kingston’s only hope was to persuade the town’s legislative body, the “Town Meeting,” to change the referendum after the fact. He brought in a new strategist and launched a human‐to‐human, on‐the‐ground charm offensive—which ultimately succeeded after a lucky series of personal introductions connected him with a particularly well‐respected retired local leader, whom he managed to persuade to advocate for his cause. After negotiating a tense, emotionally fraught peace deal with the primary activist behind the referendum, Kingston ultimately managed to persuade the town’s leadership, then overall legislative body to amend the referendum to grandfather in his facility, while keeping the ban on retail cannabis from the original referendum intact.

Although Canna Productions was able to stave off disaster in this case, its negotiation campaign with town leaders ultimately relied on a precarious combination of individual instinct and luck—something Kingston readily acknowledged in our interviews with him after the fact. Here, we seek to explore how one might replace that traditional tool kit with a set of open‐source intelligence (OSINT) techniques initially developed by organizations like Bellingcat (2020) working in the fields of investigative journalism and human rights research, which we have applied to negotiation strategy using the “3D” framework.

Despite having a population just under 30,000, in today’s digital age even a town like Oldhaven is home to millions upon millions of data points available publicly over the Internet. Using open‐source research techniques, we sifted through reams of public data (visualized in the blinded Maltego (Chauhan and Panda 2015) relationship map below^3.) about the town, key community groups, local leaders, and the personal connections and psychographic profiles of influential individuals. Analyzing Kingston’s opponents (which we have dubbed “reds”), persuadables (“yellows”), and potential supporters (“greens”) alike, our findings show a wealth of insights about the town as it relates to the referendum negotiation—what collectively could have proved a decisive edge when it came to learning about all relevant parties and their interests to shape a winning 3D strategy.

Using this dataset, here we will highlight one example from each of these red, yellow, and green camps—blinded out of a respect for individual privacy, despite the public nature of this information. We will then outline how such data could be used across each of the three dimensions of negotiation to better learn about the community, identify key players, influence perceptions, shape value‐creating deals, and mobilize supporters or neutralize opposing coalitions. While this example offers a high‐stakes case for a start‐up company at the scale of a mid‐size town, the same techniques might be applied proactively in a much wider range of settings, both large and small.

We will begin with our most prominent “red” opponent. Debbie Zimmerman—as before, a pseudonym to protect privacy—the primary activist behind the grassroots campaign against Canna Productions in Oldhaven, has an active presence across social media, providing a wealth of psychological insights and biographical details we are able to glean purely from information she has made publicly available. Together, this collection of insights could have been pivotal in helping Kingston to influence Zimmerman’s perception of her interests with regard to the Canna Productions deal, and to engage more effectively “at the table,” in the first dimension of negotiation.

Zimmerman is a project manager at a biotech firm and longtime resident of Oldhaven, posting frequent pictures of her dogs on hikes around the area. She cares deeply about the community’s image, and volunteers every year at an annual town “Beautification Day,” an event that brings together local media, scout troops, and nearby businesses to help pick up trash. She’s a conservative, a supporter of Donald Trump, and an avid opponent of marijuana. In fact, it is worth emphasizing that she had vocally supported the revised referendum (that would have destroyed Kingston’s firm) and had repurposed an active citizens group to buttress her opposition. (Some years prior, she had led this group to a decisive victory in blocking a major corporate initiative in Oldhaven that would have brought a casino to the area—despite the advantageous tax and employment opportunities it would have brought.) Zimmerman comes from a multigenerational Oldhaven family, and was worried about the town becoming “the pot destination” and attracting unsavory, countercultural elements.

But if one looks at the pages she follows on Facebook, her favorite source of health and fitness information is Dr. Rhonda Patrick, creator of wellness community FoundMyFitness—who happens to be a vocal advocate for the use of THC in specific medical conditions, or CBD to treat more common health issues like back pain. Similarly, looking at Zimmerman’s public Instagram account, the yoga studio she follows has made numerous posts that feature cannabis products and discuss the use of cannabis or CBD.

While at a conscious level Zimmerman may be steeped in the stigma around marijuana use, she also exists in a broader cultural context that might be described as either pro‐cannabis or cannabis‐adjacent—suggesting an opening to borrow language, imagery, framing, and arguments from trusted sources like these during “at the table” discussions with this “red” deal opponent. For an even more positive reception, such relationship‐building and peace‐making overtures might be conducted at the Beautification Day while volunteering side‐by‐side—as compared to a lawyerly conference room meeting or phone call explicitly debating the referendum. This might well have proved to be a far more productive forum for engagement in the “first dimension” of negotiation.

Moving to the second dimension of the 3D framework, deal design, a closer look at the psychographic details we uncovered about Zimmerman suggests the potential for value‐creating compromise. Zimmerman is especially interested in preserving the image of the town, and is most concerned about “pot culture” becoming a visible presence in her community. Yet, Canna Productions’ facility is a nondescript warehouse building located in an industrial district at the edge of town—and unbeknownst to Zimmerman, the company had no plans to establish a retail presence downtown, focusing its sales instead on high‐traffic pedestrian zones like downtown Boston. In fact, a compromise informed by this understanding of the interests at play formed the basis for the win‐win plan the town eventually agreed upon (which “grandfathered in” existing cannabis businesses while precluding competing firms from establishing any future presence in the town). Allowing Canna Productions to stay, at little cost to Zimmerman but great value to Kingston, could give Zimmerman the retail ban victory about which she was passionate. In fact, such a move would cost little for Canna Productions to concede, but provided Kingston an opening to offer Zimmerman a tangible, public “win” in her anti‐pot campaign while retaining the town’s pro‐business image—and saving Canna Productions from bankruptcy.

Armed with social media intelligence, Kingston might have arrived at this creative deal design faster or with greater certainty. He might have been able to propose a sustainable agreement that met all parties’ interests earlier in the process, before the referendum was finalized, while avoiding the risky, reputationally and financially costly campaign he was forced to undertake after the referendum had already been adopted—as a result of operating with a traditional, analog approach. In this way, social media can prove pivotal in deal design, the second dimension of the 3D model. Yet, merely proposing a “no retail” deal would have almost surely failed—given Zimmerman’s publicly vocal, seemingly unconditional opposition—without building a supportive coalition behind such an agreement.

This is where social media could have favorably changed the setup of the negotiation with Zimmerman. As we broaden our investigation across the town’s digital footprint, we next explore how social media intelligence can be used to identify potentially useful parties, whose “away from the table” recruitment (or neutralization) might help sway the outcome in a favorable direction from Kingston’s viewpoint. Beginning with a “yellow” persuadable who might be induced to remain on the sidelines and refrain from advocating against a potential deal, we examine Carolyn Carleton—an Oldhaven‐based mental health and substance abuse counselor who partners closely with the police department and the school board on drug issues. Unsurprisingly, she is actively anti‐marijuana—for example, in several LinkedIn posts she warns about higher THC levels in new strains of weed—and she hosts regular “networking breakfasts” for anti‐drug activists in the area. Given her vocal anti‐pot position and influential web of local relationships, Carleton could well have played a decisive role in defeating Canna Productions’ deal with the town.

Yet per meeting notes and agendas posted online, the overwhelming focus of her substance abuse coalition is on opioid abuse and recovery. And, a significant body of research has identified potential benefits from cannabis use for recovering opioid addicts. Were Kingston, informed by such analysis, to take it upon himself to embrace this cause and become visibly active in local and regional anti‐opioid groups—a low‐cost action on his part—he might be able to position Canna Productions as a recognized ally of this group.

While such tactics and lines of argument may be unlikely to convince Carleton to actively support cannabis in her town, they might be enough to forestall her active opposition. It might help to peel away some group members from the anti‐pot cause, or to create divisions within this coalition so that her anti‐drug network does not emerge as a key blocking vote with influence inside the police department, the school board, and other powerful local entities. Such “away from the table” moves in the third dimension of negotiation could have proved effective in neutralizing this key opponent ahead of a pivotal Town Meeting. But without the benefit of social media analysis, Kingston was unaware of the influence Carleton’s group wielded over the prominent town leaders with whom he had sought to cultivate relationships in private.

For our final example, we will remain focused on these “away from the table” activities and look at one “green” individual in particular whose broad professional network, deep ties to the town community, and personal beliefs suggest a strong potential receptivity to Canna Productions’ message—and whose support, properly mobilized, could have played a key role in rallying others.

From our open‐source scanning of local media channels and Facebook groups, Brian Hunt stood out as a primary node of relationships within the town and a key potential recruit to Canna Productions’ cause. A lifelong Oldhaven resident, local real estate agent, and current Republican candidate for local office, Hunt is active across many community forums online—and his job requires building a deep local network. What’s more, records show he has listed and sold properties in the commercial business district where Adam Kingston’s facility is located in Oldhaven.

As a potential target for outreach, Hunt might be very receptive to the idea that this anti‐cannabis referendum could cast a pall over the commercial viability of Oldhaven’s business district—and given his extensive web of personal and professional relationships, he could be a key outpost of support within the town’s conservative community. He further “likes” on Facebook several state‐level Republican legislators who have come out in favor of cannabis legalization (motivated by the tax benefits or potential PTSD treatment for veterans), suggesting good talking points for this kind of “away from the table” engagement. But again, without social media research, Kingston’s campaign at the time was unable to identify or engage this individual.

Finally, consider an application of social media along the “third dimension” of dealmaking. On the town government’s website, all 200+ Town Meeting members are listed along with their home addresses, which we have blinded in the image below. While this raises significant privacy considerations—and underscores the urgent need for organizations of all stripes to review the kinds of data they may be exposing online to less scrupulous actors—a limited, ethical application might be to ask people like Brian Hunt to speak with others who could prove persuadable. Below is a map that might be readily coded with green/supporters, yellow/persuadables, and red/opponents labels for corresponding Oldhaven parties. Acting “away from the table,” Kingston might very well have asked his green supporters to strike up informal conversations with their yellow neighbors when they see each other on the block, a far more efficient version of the analog, human‐to‐human campaign he undertook at the time.

Again, Kingston was ultimately successful in his campaign to save Canna Productions. But the outcome might very well have gone the other way, as he readily admitted to us, and the entire endeavor was costly financially, reputationally, and in terms of time and emotional stress. In hindsight, making effective use of social media intelligence and OSINT techniques—even in an in‐close negotiation under enormous time pressure since the entire process was limited to only a few weeks—could very well have played a crucial role in determining the outcome of Canna Productions’ negotiation with the town along each of the dimensions of the 3D framework. As Kingston put it as we reviewed this episode with him, “The primary technique that we used was word of mouth, personal connections, friends of friends… [but] I hear you talking [about the potential use of social media], this lightbulb was just going off… people are just giving you this stuff for free. It’s right there… In hindsight, it would be extraordinarily valuable to have a playbook that could be quickly internalized for how to utilize social media” (Sebenius 2020). While both Kingston and the outside strategist he brought on to help manage the negotiation repeated to us that they were operating within an extremely tight window of opportunity in time, our research has shown that modern analytical tools, sophisticated OSINT techniques, and a deep understanding of social media intelligence can produce immensely valuable insights within very short turnaround times, virtually anywhere in the world, at almost any scale.

For our next case, we turn our attention specifically to the third dimension of negotiation in order to further underscore the value of “away‐from‐the‐table” moves on social media to shape the deal landscape favorably—in this instance, by avoiding unwinnable “at the table” deliberations. Specifically, we will examine how our co‐author Paul Levy, then President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), used his personal blog to neutralize the Service Employee International Union’s (SEIU’s) multiyear, multimillion dollar organizing campaign to unionize BIDMC staff during the mid 2000s. For a fuller account, see Sebenius (2014).

BIDMC, a marquee Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, had just recovered from a difficult merger and ensuing intensive turnaround that left its finances in tatters. After losing money for much of the previous decade, BIDMC was finally in a stable, albeit not strong, fiscal position in 2006. Its affiliation with Harvard and deep ties to the Jewish community, historically supportive of labor, made it a prime target for the SEIU (Bell 2008)—one of the largest, best‐funded labor unions in the country. Levy, after studying the experiences of other major teaching hospitals that had recently undergone unionization, concluded that unionization would greatly hamper creativity and flexibility, decrease morale, reduce the quality of patient care, and delay, if not outright obstruct, key projects that relied on government approval such as securing financing and building permits.^4. Whether Levy was correct or not in this judgment, we will take his assessment as a given for purposes of our analysis; however, others have argued that a more cooperative labor‐management would have been a viable alternative.^5. Nevertheless determined to avoid what he deemed a damaging outcome, Levy set out to mount an effective defense armed not with lawsuits, intimidation, and union‐busting consultants, but instead using one of the early tools of social media available in 2006: a blog. But how could Levy, using only his personal blog, fend off the SEIU, with its multimillion dollar annual organizing budget and its 200‐person Massachusetts staff?

Unions can be recognized by a secret ballot election of workers eligible to be represented in future labor negotiations. There are two additional processes—beyond a traditional worker election—that make it vastly easier for unions to gain recognition. The first is to induce management to sign one form of a “neutrality agreement,” which, in Levy’s judgment, would prevent management from saying anything about the unionization process, leaving the union as the only source of information (Nemiroff 2008).^6. The second is to allow a “card‐check process,” which means once enough workers sign pledge cards, the union automatically gains recognition, bypassing any debates or elections (NLRB 2020).

Levy’s first lesson is a traditional one: know your interests—which, in this case, meant avoiding direct negotiations altogether. Levy believed unionization would negatively affect BIDMC, and either a neutrality agreement or card‐check process would pave the way for almost automatic unionization. Yet, the decision to implement either of these was completely in management’s control (Fierce Healthcare 2007a). Rightly or wrongly, Levy saw no upside to negotiating directly “at the table” with the SEIU. In fact, he was concerned that his words in such a negotiation would likely have been distorted and used against him publicly. If after full and fair debate by all sides, labor and management, BIDMC workers chose to unionize, Levy was clear that he would have accepted that result. But he did not wish management to be muzzled in the process, particularly given the precarious financial situation the hospital found itself in at that time. Instead, by largely restricting his communication to his public blog, Levy was able to avoid these potential pitfalls and keep his focus on bettering his position “away from the table,” thereby avoiding what were bound to be disastrous direct negotiations in the first dimension of the 3D framework.

As we turn to Levy’s moves away from the table, our second lesson from this case is a traditional one: to understand the full set of stakeholders and the points where they can exert pressure. The SEIU could not force Levy to directly engage or accept their demands, but it could—and actively did—attempt to enlist BIDMC’s staff, doctors, members of BIDMC’s board of directors, affiliated hospitals, and politicians to put pressure on Levy to accept a neutrality agreement or card check process (Fierce Healthcare 2007b, 2007c). Levy and his team carefully mapped all the parties with direct and/or indirect influence on the process, as is indicated in the figure below. Yet one significant challenge he faced in this complex, multiparty environment was how to rapidly communicate his perspective to the relevant stakeholders as the negotiation unfolded.

A major part of the answer to this challenge was “via his blog.” But how could this blog be effective? The third lesson from Levy’s blog at BIDMC is the vital importance of proactivity when it comes to digital strategy. Levy’s blog, “Running a Hospital,” was not a reactive tool used only for discussing BIDMC’s tangle with the SEIU. Rather, Levy had built a regular readership of over 10,000 people, consisting of BIDMC staff, health‐care executives, members of the press (especially those reporters who specialized in covering Boston’s large health‐care industry), and politicians, well in advance of his decision to use it as a tool to discuss the SEIU’s organizing efforts. Integrating social media into an organization or executive’s overall preparedness provides crucial leverage during a crisis or other high‐stakes situation—while neglecting it can open up significant vulnerabilities. (And it can be nearly impossible to create this kind of influence in the heat of an adversarial negotiation process.)

Beyond his proactive stance, Levy’s experience shows the advantages of being genuine online in order to foster trust—a particularly important asset in an information ecosystem increasingly polluted by disinformation and conflicting views of basic facts. Levy had earned trust with the blog’s readers by discussing topics atypical for public deliberation, such as his personal compensation and difficult or potentially embarrassing incidents at the hospital (Cullen 2010). Readers soon realized that his blog contained his authentic words and perspective on issues not covered in mainstream publications, including real information on controversial subjects. Neither the content nor style was wrung through legal committees or PR review processes, engendering both interest and trust—and readership soared. In contrast to Levy’s blog, the SEIU’s “Eye on BI” website only covered the SEIU’s attempts to highlight negative press about BIDMC and was clearly purpose‐built for that activity. It was not effective in garnering the same widespread, dedicated readership that Levy’s blog was able to attract.

By cultivating his online influence and building up a reservoir of trust among key audiences in this way, Levy also helped inoculate the hospital against many of the SEIU’s tactics. By combing prior public records from various legal proceedings, Levy had come into possession of an SEIU document that detailed the union’s strategic framework for this kind of “corporate campaign” (Levy 2013). From claims of malpractice to an ad blitz (Fargen 2017) to protests with billboards stating “Fire Paul Levy,” many of the union’s efforts to bring public pressure to bear on the deal were largely ineffective, because Levy was able to brace stakeholders in advance through his blog. By laying out precisely what the SEIU would do before the union took the forecasted action, the potentially negative emotional reaction could be dampened (Levy 2007a). On more than one occasion, members of the press asked Levy if a new development being trumpeted by the SEIU had merit, or if they should chalk it up to another item in the SEIU’s corporate campaign playbook. On one such occasion, a staff member brought a deceptive letter mailed by the SEIU to BIDMC's doctors to Levy’s attention. Before all the letters had been delivered, Levy had authored a blog post highlighting the inaccuracies of the SEIU’s letter, and how this tactic fit into a broader strategy to undermine morale at BIDMC (Levy 2007b). The SEIU’s tactics were not as effective as hoped because Levy’s blog was often several steps ahead and was read by people far beyond Levy’s typical communication reach.

Finally, Levy was clear and consistent with his aims from the beginning. He made no effort to hide his overall position on unionization, but why he opposed a neutrality agreement or card‐check process was at least as important as his opposition at all. Instead of focusing on the detrimental effects he believed unionization would wreak on Beth Israel, Levy frequently referred to traditional American values that should ideally guide the unionization process—but that would be short‐circuited by a neutrality or card‐check process. These included intellectual openness, full discussion by all sides of the merits of unionization, and the ability to have free and fair union elections without fear of harassment or intimidation (Fierce Healthcare 2007d). Levy’s blog allowed him to frequently re‐center the conversation about BIDMC and the SEIU on one truth: the only way to ensure these cherished values could be honored was to not enter into a neutrality agreement or permit a card‐check process but instead to engage in open discussion about the issues by all sides.

In the end, tightly coordinating with only three other members of his top management team (and keeping the board informed), Levy’s blog proved to be a significant factor in thwarting the SEIU’s campaign. After failing (for five years) to secure a neutrality agreement or a card‐check process, the SEIU ceased its attempt to unionize BIDMC; in fact, the SEIU subsequently made significant internal staff moves to sideline those who had failed to successfully execute a multiyear, very costly campaign with nothing to show for it, and had actively undermined other national SEIU priorities as a result of this high‐profile failure. The lessons for negotiators from Levy’s experience with a blog starting in 2006, when social media was in its early days, nonetheless can inform negotiations taking place today and in the future.

While Levy, acting skillfully away from the table with fairly rudimentary social media tools, managed to neutralize his opponents’ most aggressive tactics through digital channels, many prominent deals today collapse when negotiators fail to effectively mobilize potential supporters online, failing to generate what often promise to be widely beneficial agreements, with ample value creation and joint gains to distribute among otherwise skeptical stakeholders.

Consider how Amazon orchestrated a vigorous competition among 238 cities (Plitt 2019) over where it would locate its second headquarters (so‐called HQ2), ultimately deciding to split the prize with half going to Crystal City, Virginia and half to Long Island City in the borough of Queens, New York City—with the promise of 25,000 high‐paying jobs and associated economic development going to each winner. As described in an earlier Working Knowledge piece—“Seven Negotiation Lessons from Amazon's HQ Disaster in Queens” (Sebenius 2019)—New York’s mayor, governor, and the great majority of its citizens (seven in ten voters [Marshall 2019]) initially rejoiced at the city’s victory. Yet much smaller groups, heavily organized by social media, proved influential enough with key power brokers to create a cascading series of headaches and roadblocks that ultimately caused Amazon to withdraw abruptly from the project. In the face of well‐organized online opposition, the kind of detailed negotiations with New York authorities and citizen’s groups that could have addressed concerns and developed a mutually beneficial agreement never even got off the ground.

As we initially explored at the May 2020 Program on Negotiation Working Conference on AI, Technology, and Negotiation (Sebenius et al. 2020), the collapse of Amazon’s HQ2 deal in Long Island City stemmed in large part from its failure to engage effectively on social media. Using powerful network mapping technology, we were able to visualize the universe of Twitter conversation around the proposed project during a critical interval of time surrounding a pivotal New York City Council hearing. This approach enabled us to identify how Amazon’s peripheral position within the social network left one pivotal player in particular—State Senator Michael Gianaris, a local elected official who sat on a key regulatory board that exercised effective veto power over the deal—utterly surrounded by a digital echo chamber of anti‐development activists. These hyper‐online individuals—including supporters of freshly elected U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio‐Cortez (@AOC on Twitter) and others aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement—engaged in savvy, highly targeted social media mobilizing. Their efforts ultimately proved enough to overcome majority voter support in the state senator’s district, and to persuade Gianaris, an otherwise moderate pragmatist who had initially supported the deal, to become a vocal opponent—thus derailing the entire multibillion‐dollar, highly coveted project.

In the visualization below—and in the larger study from which it is drawn (Cook 2020)—our analysis demonstrates how surround‐sound mobilizing on the part of a small set of grassroots activists effectively outmaneuvered seemingly overwhelming local support and high‐level political backing, drowning out advocates with a chorus of digital criticism.

Because key project advocates were never engaged effectively online and activated to support the deal, the many economic benefits of the project never emerged in a salient and credible way—and no compromise could be negotiated between the deal’s proponents and its critics. Indeed, given the significant scale of the proposed project—projected to yield about $27.5 billion in tax revenue after $3 billion in incentives to the company (Bryan 2019)—it is easy to imagine how resources made available from the deal might have been used for purposes that would leave most stakeholders better off and assuage much criticism. For example, Amazon might have been induced to support critical infrastructure development in the neighborhood (like investing to repair portions of New York’s aging subway system, which would heavily serve its headquarters), to construct new affordable housing nearby or otherwise ensure some compensation for local residents displaced by the firm’s arrival, to open up specific well‐paying positions with priority for New York residents, to deploy technological expertise to support STEM education initiatives in local schools, or any number of other potential arrangements.

In fact, perhaps because of the wide range of opportunities that would have been available through the deal, after Amazon withdrew from their project a group of 70+ local leaders—representing community groups, unions, legislators, and business—organized themselves to pen an open letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, urging him to change his mind regarding HQ2. The letter—which the broadly representative group placed as a full‐page ad in the New York Times—stated: “A clear majority of New Yorkers support this project… we urge you to reconsider, so that we can move forward together… in a way that works for everyone… [including] investments that are necessary to ensure that the Amazon campus will be a tremendous benefit to residents and small businesses in the surrounding communities” (Partnership for New York City 2019). Regrettably, Amazon’s deal team appears not to have engaged these supporters in this kind of systematic, effective way before it was too late.

Clearly, a failure to engage with social media, particularly when it comes to these “away from the table” moves in the third dimension, is already playing a critical role in derailing crucial negotiations—particularly those in the public eye. Despite Levy’s early achievements in this area, few dealmakers grasp the importance of “away from the table” moves on social media. And today, there are many sophisticated, commercially available capabilities to detect the “away from the table” moves of others. What is particularly remarkable in this case is the nature of the company that apparently had this fatal blind spot, Amazon—one of the most technologically sophisticated and capable companies in the world. Yet somehow, despite the deepening importance of social media across virtually every aspect of modern life in the years since Levy’s experience, that sophistication and capability did not extend from Amazon’s technologists to their negotiators.

By design, the cases we have chosen to illustrate the uses of social media in negotiation cover quite a wide range of situations. They have dealt with three different industries (cannabis, health care, and e‐commerce). They have spanned three distinct settings (Oldhaven, Boston, and New York) from a fairly small city to a global metropolis. And, they have ranged in scale from large (Amazon) to medium (BIDMC) to small (Canna Productions). They have illustrated the value of social media to learn about one’s direct counterpart in order to engage more effectively at the table and inform value‐creating deal design (Oldhaven). And they have shown how social media can be used away from the table to learn about an extended set of parties (New York and Oldhaven), to influence perceptions (New York and Boston), to mobilize supporters (all three cases), as well as to neutralize opponents (Oldhaven and Boston). At best, however, these are three, somewhat representative cases—and in our research, we have found roles for social media—affecting setup, deal design, and tactics—across a wide variety of negotiations.

For example, in our advisory practice, we recently worked with a client whose counterpart’s personal Instagram page revealed him to be an avid cyclist—a coincidentally shared interest that proved useful for building interpersonal rapport at the table. Moreover, virtually every member of the other side’s negotiating team was found to be following executive search firms on LinkedIn, hinting at the possibility of personal interests at play beyond the obvious deal stakes at the table. Elsewhere, we found a counterpart whose activity on Yelp suggested a level of frustration managing the day‐to‐day mechanics of his business—mixed with evidence of a potentially short temper—and another whose employees had provided invaluable insights into company culture on the review site Glassdoor, including deep frustrations among the sales team that we were able to address through a creative deal proposal.

Social media already plays critical roles in real‐world applications where the ultimate decisions about initiatives and projects are made or decisively influenced by negotiations in regulatory and/or governing bodies from city councils to legislative committees. For example, Khan et al. found in a 2017 survey of more than fifty high‐profile development projects (primarily regarding infrastructure construction) that social media pressures from “adverse stakeholders” exerted powerful influence over the scope, timing, and terms of these initiatives, all of which are normally the subjects of multiparty negotiations (Khan et al. 2017). In Boston, local residents organized via social media helped overturn the city’s successful bid to host the 2024 Olympics, despite widespread support among the city’s leadership class (Sims 2017)—a potentially beneficial outcome for the city given the long history of cost overruns and poor return on investment from hosting the Games (Flyvbjerg et al. 2020).

Consider the following hypothetical situation that shares characteristics with a number of real cases. Suppose that a large pharmaceutical firm has developed a specialized, expensive, and effective therapy with a novel mechanism of action. Despite great promise, the new drug faces powerful incumbents and potential safety concerns. The company seeks approval from the FDA yet faces strong resistance. FDA approval requires proposals, scientific review for safety and effectiveness, and the like—but the reality of the process, while centrally influenced by scientific considerations, generally entails intensive negotiations among regulators and firms, with advocates and opponents often playing an influential background role.^7.

While the corporate‐FDA negotiations are generally headlined by issues of science, clinical characteristics, and economics, one immediate use of social media in the spirit of the above analysis—both for the pharma and regulatory personnel involved in those deliberations—would simply be to learn more about the individuals on the other side (backgrounds, interests, links, relationships, networks, etc.) in order to become more persuasive “at the table” in the first dimension of negotiation, including by identifying hearing witnesses and informal influencers whose perspective might be met with positive reception by FDA decision makers. Such an approach might also help identify the broader concerns, priorities, and affiliations of panel members—suggesting potential new avenues for value‐creating deal design in the second dimension of negotiation.

The firm might also embrace the third dimension of the 3D framework, and use social media to identify and help mobilize patient advocacy groups to communicate their personal stories to the FDA, sharing their perspectives on the urgency for approval of the proposed new therapy.^8. With respect to such approval and possible reimbursement, the pharma firms and the afflicted patients form a natural coalition that could be activated away from the table via social media. Analyzing network communications, the company might also identify and link with patient advocacy groups from other parallel disease areas to advocate for both speed and safety.

Were the pharma company in this hypothetical case to make effective use of social media in the three‐dimensional ways we have described in this article, it might ensure higher odds of a faster approval, perhaps even with more certainty. Examples of this sort, however, highlight some of the acute ethical challenges—especially financial and other conflicts of interest and disclosure—associated with the use of social media in negotiations. For example, are the patient advocacy groups—either self‐mobilized or organized and financed via the actions of the pharma company or others—legitimate, well‐informed groups of genuine patients and their supporters or heavily the creation of industry or lobbying firms? Some 83 percent of the 104 largest U.S. patient organizations receive funding, often substantial, from drug, medical device, or biotech firms (McCoy et al. 2017). How separable are the purported therapeutic benefits of the proposed drug from the financial interests of the sponsors? And, more broadly, is it in the public interest for well‐organized and larger advocacy groups to drown out the potentially more urgent needs of smaller, less well‐organized groups? (For a range of such ethical concerns associated with patient advocacy organizations, see, e.g., Kopp et al. 2018 or Ehrlich et al. 2019.)

In short, while we have illustrated the potential roles of social media in negotiation in some depth in our three main case studies, such roles extend to a much wider range of negotiating situations.

As we look across these case studies, a number of lessons are evident from which we can draw more broadly applicable inferences. In our initial analysis of this material at the May 2020 Program on Negotiation conference (Sebenius et al. 2020), we presented a simplified framework—LIMN, or “learn, influence, mobilize, neutralize”—as a widely applicable shorthand for practitioners. Yet the view of negotiation that informs this framework, Lax and Sebenius’ “3D” approach, is helpful for developing a more nuanced understanding of the full range of actual and potential roles for social media in negotiation. More specifically, from the perspective of one side of a negotiation seeking advice,^9. these roles include:

• FIRST DIMENSION: Tactics. Here, social media can be used to learn a great deal about counterparts (interests, perceptions, linkages, relationships, and networks) in order to communicate resonant messages more effectively “at the table.” Social media has an unparalleled ability to inform hyper‐targeted, hyper‐personalized communications at a scale and efficacy never before possible. As we have seen through our case studies, similar applications can prove invaluable for negotiators to guide “standard” deal strategy and tactics, helping to enhance understanding of personality and interpersonal style, and thus to inform decisions around with whom to connect, in what manner, and how outreach should best be framed.^10.

• SECOND DIMENSION: Deal Design. In this arena, social media is useful to design and propose better‐informed deal structures. By gathering the same kind of data that allows individualized mass persuasion and advertising by marketers, social media can grant unprecedented access to information about counterparts’ preferences, relationships, values, and priorities. This learning can open up entirely new possibilities for designing value‐creating deals.

• THIRD DIMENSION: Setup. Here, we have found social media invaluable to enhance and extend “standard” party and interest mapping via network analysis. Often, social media can help illuminate a fuller range of stakeholders beyond those that negotiators may assess directly. Using sophisticated network analysis tools and the techniques of open‐source intelligence, negotiators armed with a modern grasp of social media can develop a nuanced understanding of the “social ecology” of their counterparts: patterns of influence, deference, and antagonism; flows of information and resources; and more.

In addition, within the third dimension social media can be useful at crucial moments to leverage important constituencies on one side’s behalf “away from the table.” This crucial, potentially game‐changing application of social media for negotiators stems from the ability to identify and connect large groups of people united by shared interests (or perceived enemies), and to organize them to take collective action in support of common goals. Effectively welding the might of a well‐coordinated cohort of deal proponents grants enormous benefits to a savvy negotiator. Such influence can take the place of direct moves to rouse supporters and induce them to lobby key decision makers on behalf of one's deal (or their stake in this deal), to provide supporting testimonials to influence choices, or to conduct direct outreach to opponents or persuadables for whom credible surrogates may prove more effective than the primary negotiators.^11.

Beyond these roles, one particular application stands out as especially important across all three dimensions of negotiation, warranting further exploration. This is to anticipate and prevent/counter actual and potential initiatives by the “other side(s).”

A key consideration for those looking to apply these findings in practice lies in the decision to go on the offensive—rousing supporters, creating “surround‐sound” effects to persuade key decision makers, actively working to neutralize the impact of opponents—or to play defense and work to anticipate, preempt, counteract, and adapt to the social media actions of others. Importantly, defensive plays online need not always be passive, and frequently can seek to preempt or block the formation of hostile opposition coalitions.

Whether one is seizing the initiative or responding to counterparts, proactive is almost always superior to reactive when it comes to social media in negotiation. Modern dealmakers would often be wise to take actions well in advance of any potential deals to build strength, cultivate influence, uncover weaknesses and vulnerabilities (“attack surfaces”), and generally work to foster resilience and strength across all relevant digital ecosystems. Indeed, social media can prove particularly helpful for negotiators who embrace it proactively—or especially damaging for those who fail to prepare.

As the tools and techniques of social media analysis become ever more widespread, and as the costs and barriers to entry continue to fall, it will become increasingly common for counterparties to begin exploring and adopting many of the approaches we have outlined in this article. More deals like Amazon’s bid for a second headquarters will be derailed by disproportionately influential digital minorities. (We would argue that such actions by deal opponents were costly in the case of New York but may well have been beneficial in the Boston Olympics example.) Given the disruption that the arrival of digital media and the advent of the information age have had on industry after industry over the last decade, it seems inescapable that negotiation strategies will be forced to adapt in much the same way, with stark divides emerging between digital winners and laggards. And even where the parties “at the table” may be in agreement on the issues, outside players acting through social media may either complicate or ease the process—a prospect that negotiators should increasingly expect as part of the deal landscape.

As firms across the negotiating landscape begin embracing these developments and exploring new methods for winning deals, adequate preparation will become of paramount importance. Taking steps today to conduct “red team”‐style audits^12. that help anticipate likely lines of digital assault will help negotiators limit and defend potential attack surfaces, preempt easily preventable strikes, and move swiftly to counteract or limit the damage from hostile mobilizations (Zenko 2015). Even for firms who never wish to employ social media proactively or whose deals typically fly well under the radar, preventative measures today can at the very least limit the amount of valuable information inadvertently exposed to counterparts through social media channels.

On a more sinister level, many competitors—especially those in less well‐governed regions, or state‐owned firms with hostile political agendas—may prove far less scrupulous about the ethical boundaries in which social media can be used for negotiation. If the foreign disruption of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is any indication of the scale and impact that such influence campaigns and information operations might well have on their unsuspecting targets, it is increasingly urgent that individuals and firms begin preparing today for these emerging threats. One of our goals in writing this article is to sound the alarm and encourage all negotiators to carefully consider where across their digital media ecosystem they might be vulnerable to unethical, unscrupulous, or underhanded influence online.

Readers will note that the roles listed in this section range from highly tactical moves in real time to preemptive analysis of vulnerabilities (or “attack surfaces”) aimed at informing preparations well in advance of actual deliberations. These roles help to illustrate the broad applicability of our findings to negotiators of all stripes, facing any number of challenges. In our next section focused on tools, methodologies, and data sources, we have constructed a helpful guide to understanding which of these roles and approaches may be best suited for a given negotiation circumstance.

As we explore the intersection of social media and negotiation, it is useful to provide some background on the types of social media tools and data sources we have found to be potentially relevant for dealmakers. But first, we note that a significant body of research exists pointing to the predictive power of social media data in personality assessments. In short, while some skeptics may dismiss the value of information from sources like Facebook profiles—thinking it too idealized a portrait, biased by desired individual presentation of self—elements of social media data including language use can in fact be highly predictive of personality traits (e.g., see Park et al. 2014). In a similar vein, Back et al. (2010) found that computer models could more accurately assess personality than human judges; and Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwell (2015) found similar automated judgments of social media data to be more accurate than the judgments made by close friends, family, and colleagues. For negotiators seeking to develop deeper understanding of their counterparts’ true interests, biases, perceptions, and interpersonal preferences, careful assessment of social media data might well prove even more valuable than reports from individuals with direct personal knowledge.

As mentioned at the outset of this article, when referring to potentially valuable sources of such information, our use of the term “social media” is not limited to the largest or most well‐known platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, but includes many more additional platforms than we could possibly list. Of course, the landscape of digital communications platforms is ever‐changing and fast‐evolving. Nevertheless, below is a snapshot of some of the social media sources we have found relevant in doing this work:

Making effective use of information from such platforms often requires the use of modern analytic software to parse the vast streams of data generated each day across billions of users online. New tools, new developers, and new capabilities are emerging continuously, but at the time of writing some examples include social listening dashboards like Brandwatch, BuzzSumo, Meltwater, Talkwalker, and Sysomos; social network analysis tools like Visualyzer, UCINet, Netlytic, Gephi, and Hoaxy; and emerging intelligence platforms such as NetBase Quid.

Each of these tools—and the value of subsequent analysis—depends entirely on the availability of data from the relevant platforms. Sources of data and restrictions on each rapidly and continuously change, and are subject to evolving government regulations, company policies, and the whims of public pressure or executive preference. At the time of writing, platforms like Twitter and Reddit that allow anonymous accounts tend to be designed more around public posting and often make data available for purchase, while Facebook’s suite of platforms—Facebook proper, Instagram, and WhatsApp—have tended (in response to various forms of blowback around user privacy concerns) to restrict public access to data streams except via their own channels. Elsewhere, various additional sources exist, from customer relationship management (CRM) applications to public records databases. For more background on data sources and availability, see research guides from, for example, the United Kingdom’s Social Media Research Group (2016), University of Minnesota Libraries (2020), University of Michigan Library (2020), and many more.

In thinking through where such tools and methodologies can be most effectively applied for negotiation and conflict resolution purposes, several distinctions have emerged for those seeking to apply these lessons in practice or in novel settings. In particular, such distinctions can help guide the selection of platforms, data sources, and software from the broader available “tool kit” we have identified. Next, we present a sampling of different tools and techniques that might be helpfully applied across a wide range of negotiation circumstances.

As our case studies have shown and as we have found in our advisory practice, social media data are not only relevant in big, public negotiations or when explosive private details might burst into public awareness; even in private and lower‐profile deals, open‐source intelligence techniques and other “in close” approaches can help map counterpart networks and provide crucial insights. For almost any deal, understanding the extent of stakeholder interest and influence can help savvy negotiators better understand and prepare for the nature and full range of potential threats and opportunities for their deal stemming from social media. But knowing which tools and techniques best fit a given deal situation requires a careful assessment of the full range of interests across all actual and potentially relevant parties.

In many cases, it may be helpful to envision concentric circles to identify where social media can matter and in what form—from truly one‐to‐one negotiations between monolithic principals to multiparty deals with influence exerted at some remove. Broadly speaking, such “circles” of external negotiation interest can be helpfully organized along a continuum of public visibility and attention, and might include immediate counterparts (highly private) alongside their internal constituencies (small group), personal networks (at “public risk” or wider disclosure), and broader sets of actual or potentially interested parties (highly public). While far from exhaustive, the following table presents these distinctions and a sample of corresponding sources and approaches.

Across each of these categories, but in particular the more public set of negotiations, social media amplifies the importance of these broader concentric rings of potential influence, but it does not necessarily create the importance of these parties. To take just one example, consider the experience of Michael Jackson’s lawyer, John Branca, who in the early 1980s negotiated the superstar musician’s acquisition of the master recordings of his own tracks (Sebenius and Green 2020a, 2020b). While the deal was inherently complicated and ultimately facilitated by Jackson’s star power, the actual deliberations themselves took place in private.

In contrast, singer‐songwriter Taylor Swift has employed the “direct intervention” role of social media in seeking to acquire the master recordings of her own music, most notably via Twitter in November 2020 (Swift 2020), when she posted private communications to the platform in an effort to stoke and use public outrage among her almost ninety million followers to degrade the value of the asset and force a sale where prior negotiations had been futile for Swift. This case is a prototypical example of what we have categorized above as “public risk,” where one or more parties can bring social media pressure to bear to alter the balance of a deal.

While Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson are (or were) stars in their own right, social media’s impact extends beyond merely giving such celebrities another effective tool to gain leverage in their negotiations. As we saw in the Amazon HQ2 case study, lesser‐known figures can achieve outsize influence through the democratizing power of digital media, while even relatively small‐scale deals like the cannabis negotiation in Oldhaven can be advanced through studying the social media contacts of individuals like Brian Hunt.

Of course, the power of these tools depends on the judgment and skill of the negotiators and/or analysts using them. Social media savvy is a capability that negotiators need to develop or acquire. While this article has explored numerous potential avenues for using open‐source intelligence and analytic tools, some more sophisticated than others, adopting even a small portion of these approaches could have made a pivotal difference across the case studies we analyzed. This kind of OSINT investigation, social media mobilization, and proactive neutralization can be integrated deeply into every aspect of a negotiation campaign—but often, mere awareness of these dynamics alone can make a significant difference for negotiators facing a wide range of deal situations.

To more fully understand the intersection between the study and practice of negotiation and the emerging field of social media intelligence and analysis, we have borrowed from our own experience and expertise, alongside extensive reviews of a diverse range of fields—among them digital diplomacy, influence mapping, stakeholder mapping, digital marketing, lobbying, political campaigning including so‐called fishbowl or surround sound campaigns, cyber‐influence campaigns, information operations, and the Open‐Source Intelligence community (e.g., Bellingcat 2020). We owe a great debt of gratitude to the many individuals and organizations whose work has helped inform this analysis, of which there are too many to list here.

Yet, much remains to be explored in the vast areas of intersection between negotiation strategy and social media intelligence. While we have found early success manually adapting tools originally intended for application in domains like cybersecurity, marketing, public affairs, or customer service, there remain significant gaps—and high barriers—when it comes to putting these approaches into widespread practice at scale. Few negotiators or their staffs will have the native fluency with online media required to parse the jargon, shorthand, and technical intricacies of the wide and varied set of digital communities that might be relevant to a given deal, requiring layers of translation and summary between expert analysts and senior executives that may degrade information quality—and miss potentially key insights.

No tools currently exist that synthesize the various elements of social media intelligence required to inform deal campaign strategies in a comprehensive manner. As social media becomes an increasingly integral component of negotiations, considerable research is needed to explore how automation technologies can aid in meta‐search across numerous social media platforms to give comprehensive psychographic profiles of counterparts, including personality traits as they relate to interpersonal negotiating style. Such tools might then generate relationship maps among key players and identify potentially hidden networks through stakeholder graph visualizations—thereby enabling negotiators to plumb the backgrounds, interests, perspectives, and relationships of a broader set of potentially relevant parties.

Armed with a social media analysis tool kit developed specifically for the purpose of informing negotiation strategies, a far wider range of deal scenarios and case studies might be analyzed, helping to generate vastly more insights with deeper grounding in a more varied set of circumstances—and potentially even opening up the opportunity to explore important cross‐cultural differences across languages, age groups, diverse populations, and regions of the world, including for application in helping resolve long‐standing diplomatic tensions recently exacerbated by social media‐fueled cycles of antagonism.

In sum, much more research would greatly assist dealmakers and their staffs in understanding the full range of applications of social media across the fields of negotiation and conflict resolution, the intricacies of its use in novel deal settings, and a fuller set of best practices and common pitfalls for negotiators applying these principles in their own deals. In its modern incarnation, social media is also a phenomenon barely a decade old, and its revolutionary effects are just beginning to be understood across society more broadly—even as the technology, norms, regulations, and applications advance and evolve at a blistering pace. Nevertheless, we have found the core tenets of the 3D negotiation approach to be flexible, adaptable, and thoroughly well‐suited to understanding—and successfully navigating—negotiation in the information age.

This article has presented a comprehensive framework for applying the many tools, techniques, and technologies of the social media era to inform and enhance negotiation strategies for deals of all types. In our advisory practice as well as in the case studies we have analyzed as part of our research into this area, we have found social media to be valuable in helping negotiators learn, influence, mobilize, and neutralize across the three dimensions of the “3D” negotiation model.

In our first case study, Canna Productions might have ensured far greater likelihood of success, avoided a costly and risky public campaign, and worked with far greater efficiency by leveraging open‐source intelligence techniques to identify better ways to engage with counterparts “at the table,” propose superior deal structures “on the drawing board,” and use away‐from‐the‐table actions to identify and deal with allies and antagonists who might be induced to support or stay neutral throughout the negotiation process.

In our second case study, Paul Levy managed to avoid what he regarded as an unwinnable face‐to‐face negotiation “at the table” by proactively investing in his digital influence, thus building up a loyal following that could be activated “away from the table” to neutralize even the most bare‐knuckle tactics from his well‐funded SEIU counterparts.

In contrast, our third case study showed how more than a decade later, one of the most valuable and tech‐savvy companies in the world failed to learn the lessons of Levy’s success, and found itself outmatched online by a group of digitally fluent activists who were able to derail a multibillion‐dollar deal with majority local support by targeting key digital pressure points with surround‐sound organizing.

Across these and several other examples, we have shown how social media is already being used as a tactic to directly intervene in negotiations from afar, how it can be readily mined for invaluable insights to inform more effective communication “at the table,” how interpersonal and relationship data might reveal crucial interests behind bargaining positions in order to craft better value‐creating deal designs, how network analysis approaches can enhance and extend traditional party and interest mapping to great effect, and how supporters and opponents might be engaged “away from the table” in order to radically shift the deal landscape in one’s favor. We have also highlighted the potentially high value in taking the initiative when it comes to cultivating influence and allies online, as well as identifying blind spots, vulnerabilities, and digital “attack surfaces.”

Social media is not only relevant in highly public deals that attract significant outside attention. In virtually any deal—ranging from small‐scale negotiations with limited scope and of little interest among third parties to deals that inherently involve numerous external factors, parties, and interests that must be balanced—the vast amount of information and unparalleled connective power of social media create significant opportunities for savvy negotiators to design value‐creating deals or shift the situation advantageously. Yet this huge amount of data may also open up many negotiations to derailment, chaos, and failure.

Beyond the direct uses of social media in negotiation, a parallel objective of this article has been to draw the attention of the business community and others to the volume of information currently available online about virtually any individual of interest. With potentially crucial insights leaking out to the public—or unscrupulous counterparts—unbeknownst to organizational leaders, firms should take proactive steps to mitigate the impact of hostile or unscrupulous actors leveraging these techniques. Indeed, even for high‐profile leaders in the public eye—politicians, celebrities, CEOs, and other leaders—who may have taken proactive steps to restrict the amount of information they make publicly available, the networked structure of social media creates numerous opportunities to learn about an individual through their less‐cautious connections’ profiles.^13. As such, audits of potential “attack surfaces” and vulnerabilities for negotiation and other purposes become ever more advisable.

Finally, as we have elaborated and emphasized throughout this article, mining open‐source data for learning and influence as well as for employing social media campaigns to mobilize or neutralize interested parties creates inherent challenges around personal and company values. In our view, any use of this kind of open‐source information must be guided by considerations of privacy and ethics. While best practices have yet to be fully explored and further research is needed to fully understand the implications of OSINT and social media‐enhanced negotiations, we have adhered to a number of guidelines to protect the privacy of individuals in question in this article. Although open‐source intelligence and social media approaches can be productive, we judge intrinsic and instrumental ethical considerations, especially surrounding individual privacy, to be of paramount importance when applying these techniques. Developing a widely accepted set of ethical and privacy guidelines for the uses of social media by negotiators should become an increasingly urgent priority.