PON Conference: Enhanced Party & Interest Mapping via Social Media
In partnership with Lax Sebenius, we are continuing to build on our groundbreaking 3D Negotiation™ approach and have been working to incorporate powerful new analytic tools and methodologies that mine public, open-source data from social media in order to help improve deal outcomes at every level.
Social media’s disruptive effects have been felt in virtually every corner of the business world. Yet the negotiations community has given this topic surprisingly little attention, leaving dealmakers unprepared to navigate the many challenges of the digital age, exposed to potentially critical vulnerabilities, and at a significant disadvantage to their more-agile, savvy counterparts who will increasingly gain asymmetric advantages using these technologies.
In a recent conference presentation via the Program on Negotiation and in an accompanying webinar we hosted on on this topic, David, Jim and Ben explored how data that is made freely available on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and community forums can help inform negotiation strategy in virtually any setting. Showcasing different social media platforms and a new suite of tools, we focused on a much smaller, more ‘in-close’ setting than we dealt with in previous webinars. Specifically, we analyzed how these sophisticated tools could help a legal cannabis company negotiate a potential bankruptcy threat from unexpectedly adverse actions by its host, a small New England town. We showed:
How open-source data from social media might have helped our protagonist learn more about a crucial counterpart’s motivations, interests and personality;
How similar analysis might have been employed to better influence her position by using language, imagery and arguments borrowed from trusted sources to change her perception of the target deal;
How scanning through local media outlets and community forum groups could have helped identify a crucial latent supporter with a strong interest in the outcome and a potentially pivotal local network to mobilize; and
How low-cost actions on the part of our protagonist might have helped to neutralize a key hostile blocking coalition using wedge issues to divide a group with the ear of influential local leaders.