HBR: A Playbook for Negotiators in the Social Media Era
The disruptive effects of social media have been felt in virtually every corner of the world. It can move markets, foment unrest, sow disinformation — and sink business deals.
A survey of “adversarial stakeholders” in negotiations across more than 50 large projects worldwide found that social media often played a significant role, ultimately influencing deliberations over whether the projects would go forward at all, on what time scale, and under what terms. Yet the information revolution has been largely ignored in the field of negotiation. We believe this is a stunning blind spot and that social media can be ethically harnessed to shape the negotiating stage to one’s advantage — or to avoid catastrophe.
In general, senior negotiators often see the disruptive power of the internet as something to avoid rather than an opportunity to exploit. Citing his experiences with the Iran nuclear and Cuba normalization talks, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently told one of us that “you want to try to stay away from [social media]” and that it has “driven negotiations into a much more secret, private track.” This instinct to ignore or avoid social media is equally prevalent among business negotiators, even though their colleagues in marketing, customer service and beyond have long embraced digital disruption.
Negotiation theorists who have considered the digital revolution tend to focus on adapting existing practices to new channels. This can be quite useful — for example, see Hal Movius or Deepak Malhotra on making effective tactical use of Zoom — but misses the main point. Social media is not just a new medium: it creates entirely new capabilities and paradigms. That’s what makes it so disruptive in business, diplomacy, culture, and politics. But embracing this change requires developing novel strategies native to the internet age, and to date its transformative impact on dealmaking has gone largely untapped.