Social media has changed how business interacts with the public, governments, and each other, but negotiation strategies rarely take it into account. If they do, they tend to treat it as a liability. Both ignore a huge opportunity, and one that might not be ignored by your counterpart. Social media enables companies to learn much more about counterparts (and other potentially interested parties) than can be gained from traditional in-person querying, and it gives them new tools to influence key stakeholders, mobilize supporters, and neutralize opposition tactics. The power of using — or failing to use — these levers can be seen in Amazon’s HQ2 defeat in New York City, where activists swarmed key decision makers and pushed them to reject a deal with Amazon. While this was happening Amazon’s negotiating team was secluded, and failed to respond to the online threat — an oversight that contributed to the ultimate defeat of the deal.
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.
Understanding and Influencing Counterparts
Negotiators urgently need to learn how to navigate the digital era and reckon with its promising uses, best practices, and common pitfalls. In particular, they need to prepare for disruption, including by proactively cultivating digital influence, alliances, and resilience, as well as auditing key vulnerabilities and attack surfaces to head off problems before they become fatal to important deals. If negotiators want to use social media to learn about, influence, mobilize, or neutralize others in negotiations, though, they also need to understand and respect the specific privacy and ethical concerns it brings into play — or else risk causing harm, damaging reputations, undercutting legitimacy, and backfiring.
This new paradigm requires negotiators to update their strategies. Because the digital era is changing every aspect of dealmaking, negotiators need to take a comprehensive, “3-D approach” to understand and prepare for how the process can be disrupted and used. Particularly in today’s hyperconnected, 24/7 world, the reality of negotiation almost always extends beyond primary negotiators to involve other potentially influential parties. Winning strategies must incorporate traditional “at the table” tactics (the 1st dimension), deal design (2nd dimension), and setup moves “away from the table” (3rd dimension) that are essential in shaping outcomes. Adapting this 3-D lens to the internet era, we have found that social media can sharply enhance negotiating effectiveness in four ways:
- Social media can help negotiators reliably learn about the full set of parties who may be relevant to a negotiation, including those with potential influence away “from the table.” It often reveals information about these parties’ personalities, interests, perceptions, sources of information and influence, relationships, and how groups may respond to a potential deal. As this goes both ways, it’s smart to regularly perform rigorous “red teaming” exercises — in which a friendly team assumes the perspective of an opponent — to understand your own possible vulnerabilities.
- It offers a mechanism to wield effective influence, both directly and indirectly. That may include framing messages that resonate, invoking credible sources and surrogates, and informing the creative design of high-value/low-cost proposals that respond to parties’ true interests.
- It makes it possible to mobilize coalitions of supporters who can shape the situation “at the table” by swaying key decision makers “away from the table” — especially at pivotal moments.
- Finally, it can be used to neutralize, inoculate against, outflank, creatively placate, convert, or otherwise deal with actual and potential deal opponents.
In our research, we’ve found that these lessons can be deployed at almost any scale and in just about every negotiating context. We’ve looked at the case of an entrepreneur in the legal cannabis production business negotiating with a small municipality where a surprise referendum would have driven him out of business. He won, but we have since demonstrated how he could have waged a more effective campaign using open-source data available freely on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and local forums (abundant even in this town of 30,000). In another recent case, a hospital CEO in a pro-labor city wielded a personal blog to proactively fend off a multi-year, multimillion-dollar unionization campaign from one of the largest and best-funded unions in the country. (Notably, this use of social media as an honest and effective communications tool is a far cry from the kind of morally dubious union-busting tactics that recently have attracted backlash, including compiling detailed dossiers on individual employees and other forms of quasi-legal surveillance.) Or consider how a small, agile group of opponents employed social media to catalyze a local movement against the planned 2024 Olympics in Boston — that was supported by the governor, mayor, and many prominent citizens — and convinced the state to withdraw despite being outspent 1,500 to 1.
Each of these cases involved some version of learning much more about counterparts (and other potentially interested parties) than can be gained from traditional in-person querying, influencing key stakeholders, mobilizing supporters, and neutralizing opposition.
But an example of special value for corporate leaders might be Amazon’s failed bid for a second headquarters (“HQ2”) in Long Island City, NY. In a 2019 HBS Working Knowledge article, one of us offered seven lessons on how Amazon might have better negotiated this challenge, but did not emphasize the role of social media — a major oversight. Using openly available data, which we’ve analyzed in detail, we now understand how small groups were able to use social media to cause a giant of the digital age to abruptly withdraw from this major project despite widespread local support, and explore how this outcome could have been avoided by employing our framework.
Social Media and Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco in New York
After a competition among 238 cities, Amazon chose New York City in late 2018 to host its second headquarters, bringing with it an anticipated $27.5 billion in net new tax revenue and at least 25,000 new jobs with average salaries over $150,000. New York’s governor and mayor enthusiastically supported the deal along with 80% of registered voters.
But soon, scattered on-the-ground protests metastasized online into a broader anti-Amazon backlash with city council and other meetings disrupted by vocal critics. As pressure mounted, one vociferous opponent — State Senator Michael Gianaris — was nominated to a key policy board with oversight of the deal terms. Because this body required unanimity to approve new projects, Gianaris’s confirmation would effectively have handed veto power to a deal adversary. Blindsided by such hostility, Amazon abruptly withdrew from the deal in February 2019.
To many who watched this turn of events, the primary cause appeared clear: With an increasingly strident anti-corporate agenda, digitally savvy followers of newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and progressive groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had used social media to spread and organize protests that blocked Amazon. But this explanation misses vital parts of the story.
Our analysis suggests how Amazon — and other firms facing similar negotiations — could have anticipated this opposition, tracked its growth across digital communities in real time, and forged an online set of responses to ensure that the far more numerous supporters of the deal would have become much more influential. This could have led to a negotiated outcome with huge gains for virtually all of New York’s stakeholders — and for Amazon, which had selected New York based on an elaborate data-driven analysis of its overall attractiveness for HQ2.
To visualize the impact of social media — and identify potentially effective responses — we generated a series of network graphs analyzing Twitter conversations surrounding a crucial city council hearing about the HQ2 project (see accompanying chart). Through this visualization, we capture the effectively unopposed, real-time formation of a hostile digital coalition that tanked the deal.
What might the Amazon deal team have learned in real time from this type of analysis? Start by looking at Senator Gianaris’s Twitter account in the center of the figure below. In this chart, dots (or “nodes”) represent Twitter users, lines (or “edges”) are direct mentions between them, and their position in relation to each other is a measure of importance or influence within the overall conversation. A lifelong moderate, Gianaris represented State Senate District 12, the proposed location for the HQ2 site, where 77 percent of voters initially supported the project — as did he, before emerging as a vocal opponent.
Why the about-face? While we are not privy to Amazon’s internal discussions, its deal team could have employed social media analysis to learn that Gianaris’s account was utterly surrounded by deal opponents like the Twitter users aligned with Ocasio-Cortez (in blue); Zephyr Teachout, a DSA-aligned author (in green); and other anti-Amazon activists (in pink). As an online lobby, this coalition of anti-development users was drowning out all other voices.
Perhaps shockingly, Amazon’s own account — and those of its supporters, also in orange — appears utterly peripheral to the extensive Twitter conversations swarming this key pressure point (Gianaris). Few allies show up with the ability to respond online, address concerns, correct falsehoods, and make the positive case for HQ2. (Since its HQ2 defeat, Amazon has begun to take a more active position online, most recently responding directly to politicians’ posts regarding unionization efforts at its warehouses. These efforts have attracted significant controversy both externally and from within the company, and it’s notable that the company continues to operate without a significant coalition of online supporters.)
While high-profile voices such as Ocasio-Cortez were important factors in derailing HQ2, Amazon’s opposition owes much of its power to less familiar, small-scale “bridge” accounts (boxed in our chart). These may have relatively few followers, but our analysis shows them engaging in peer-to-peer conversations and connecting otherwise distinct clusters of accounts — behavior that platform algorithms often reward, giving “bridge” users disproportionate influence online.
For example, the analysis above reveals that many of these bridge accounts belong to protestors aligned with the “Abolish ICE” (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) movement (see @MaketheRoadNY). While the HQ2 deal had nothing to do with immigration rights, these users had separate grievances with Amazon over its Web Services division’s relationship with ICE. HQ2 presented an opportunity for this group to exert outsized leverage over the company.
At a minimum, such social media insight could have helped Amazon — coordinating with credible local allies — enter the online fray to counter the hostile digital coalition that was forming around key players such as Senator Gianaris. The company had formidable potential assets for this task: When it pulled out, more than 70 influential figures — including many local elected officials, key union figures, and community group leaders — wrote an open letter in The New York Times imploring Bezos to reconsider. Such widespread support, expressed after the fact, could have been effective if mobilized in advance to generate a counter-coalition based on the huge job and tax benefits HQ2 would bring.
It is unlikely that Amazon could transform opponents like immigration activists into supporters, but mobilizing a large group of online supporters could have neutralized much opposition. With supporters in the vocal majority, there could have been a constructive negotiation between Amazon and local officials to address concerns that animated skeptics, such as insufficient housing, rising rents, congestion, public transportation, etc. Drawing on the $27.5 billion in net tax revenues the project would generate (along with the $3 billion in concessions to Amazon), such a negotiation could have produced an agreement that strongly benefitted most stakeholders.
No one imagines that a company as digitally sophisticated as Amazon would neglect their online presence entirely. Yet the deal team — reportedly secluded in a blacked-out conference room in D.C., walled off from the rest of the company to prevent leaks — may well have had no internal integration with Amazon’s social listening and digital analytics functions a common organizational design mistake. In today’s world, social media cannot be relegated to marketing or communications divisions; internet-savvy practitioners should be active participants in developing and implementing negotiation strategies and tactics.
This failure underscores the importance of proactively cultivating an ability to influence digital discourse. Without it, our cannabis entrepreneur was left scrambling to build support and block opponents. Building a distributed base of support on social media gives negotiators like our hospital CEO the digital high ground to shape deal outcomes; remaining largely absent, like Amazon, risks being outmaneuvered online. As this analysis shows, Amazon’s apparent failure to learn, influence, mobilize and/or neutralize on social media led to dramatic and sub-optimal results. (For those interested in analyses of the hospital, cannabis, and Amazon cases that go well beyond the concise versions presented above, see our webinar series and recent Negotiation Journal article.)
What Negotiators Can Learn from the HQ2 Defeat
When it comes to navigating social media, many negotiators are still making it up as they go along without a clear sense of best practices, emerging opportunities, or major mistakes to avoid. Our research offers actionable guidance for negotiators to use social media to their advantage.
1) Use open-source information to learn about the full set of parties, understand their personalities, interests, perceptions, and relationships, as well as to carry out extended party mapping more systematically. Such insights can enable negotiators to wield effective influence, both directly (“at the table”) and indirectly (“away from the table”), and so help to mobilize potential supporters as well as to deter and/or neutralize potential opponents.
2) Seize the initiative online – before, during, and after the process – by cultivating likely allies and minimizing potential attack surfaces (including seemingly peripheral third parties or tangential concerns, especially for negotiations in the public eye). For deals or disputes that may attract broader attention, modern negotiators should conduct “red team” audits — a practice from national defense and cybersecurity that assumes the perspective of a hostile opponent to uncover weak points — to identify digital vulnerabilities and potential opponents that must be accounted for in deal strategies and tactics.
3) Integrate the digital and physical aspects of deal strategy. As potentially critical as the social media dimensions of negotiation may be, they should not be considered separately from the other elements of strategy and tactics. Indeed, social media strategies are most effective when integrated into a comprehensive 3D approach: ensuring the most promising setup, designing value-creating deals, and employing persuasive problem-solving tactics. In the information age, pursuing deals by traditional means without fluency in online networks risks flying blind and being outmaneuvered by more digitally savvy, agile rivals.
4) Take ethical and privacy concerns to heart. Abuses can not only be morally wrong but also costly in reputational, financial, and legal terms — and can backfire. As digital norms continue to evolve, negotiators should pay close attention not only to the letter of privacy regulations and laws, but also to their spirit.
While we’ve illustrated these points using network visualizations (HQ2), a simple blog (the hospital example), and traditional platforms like Facebook and Instagram (the cannabis company), many other tools and datasets can be valuable for negotiators. Our research remains early-stage, but social media is only increasing in importance. As these techniques grow more widespread across the business community, digital fluency will become the new normal in negotiation. Like about-to-be conquered France behind the Maginot line, organizations that fail to embrace the new reality of social media in their negotiations increasingly will be outmaneuvered and left behind.
Author’s note: All the co-authors work or have worked in various capacities at Lax Sebenius LLC (www.negotiate.com), a negotiation strategy advisory firm.