Facebook’s Politics & Government division for the Europe, Middle East & Africa region began as what could best be described as a relationship-building mission for the diplomatic community.  Initially coined the “Public Value Programme” before it was re-branded the “Politics & Government” division, it quickly transformed into the diplomatic corps of the company alongside the public policy team.  I had the pleasure of founding the division and serving as essentially the role of Facebook’s first “Secretary of State.”  These eight years – first based in California and then in London working across political leadership in more than 40 countries – shaped my perspectives on the present and future role of corporate diplomacy as defined by the unique role that the 21st-century tech company plays in local, national, and international societal governance.    

I was based at the company’s headquarters, which in 2009 was still in Palo Alto, California, when an earthquake struck Chile and impacted an entire swath of the Pacific Rim.  We held our regular Communications & Public Policy team meeting – at the time so small that the entire “global” team fit inside a single room – and learned that something extraordinary had happened in the wake of the Earthquake’s tectonic disruption.  Facebook usage had gone up in countries affected.  So stark was this uptick, it was noticeable even on a platform that by that time had hundreds of millions of users from around the world.  

That Facebook usage would markedly increase during a natural disaster was novel.  It caused the team to pause and to reflect.  After all, Facebook wasn’t designed as a platform where people would go to share and look for information about serious things.  In its inception, that really wasn’t the point.  Facebook was meant to connect and have fun with your network of friends.  Moreover, the human behavior of an individual turning to a social network as a reaction to a newsworthy event was hardly a “thing” at the time.  

We were in new territory.  And we knew it.  A senior executive on the Communications & Public Policy team – which essentially serves the purpose of the “diplomatic corps” of a tech firm - lamented that we did not have a stronger network within U.S. Diplomatic circles, not only to alert them to this changing behavior, but also to ensure they were aware that people were actively looking for official advice and information as to where to go and what to do in the wake of an emergency.  At the time, government communications offices and spokespeople were focused on traditional sources of news to get information out to citizens.  Aside from a few progressive and forward-thinking outliers, government institutions were not set up to hire and train a team to look after social media communications. 

It dawned on me, sitting on the floor during that meeting (there weren’t enough chairs for all – Facebook at the time was in a regular cycle of moving offices, outgrowing the space, and then moving again), that if we didn’t alert Embassies as to how these patterns of communications were changing, no one would.  It was our responsibility.  Trends that are so crystal-clear in the Silicon Valley – surrounded as the region is by data-driven tech companies that capture the zeitgeist of the global citizenry – are often not met with the same level of clarity in government offices half-way around the world.  In fact, what seems so obvious to tech company insiders feels not only distinctly foreign, but often dangerous to policymakers farther afield.  And so the responsibility very much seemed to rest upon our shoulders not only to inform diplomatic circles as to how the spread of information on Facebook was getting serious, but also to onboard them to the platform.  In fact, globally, in the absence of an official public “page” for a government entity, individual Facebook users would set up their own, which in turn thousands of people would assume was the official voice of the government entity or institution.  This behavior would eventually become one of the most chronic issues that my team would later grapple with as we worked with government offices around the world to onboard them to Facebook.  

By the time the Politics & Government division for the Europe, Middle East & Africa region was finally codified in January 2011 – the first region globally to have such a division and the division of which I founded and led from 2011 to 2016 – the division spanned more than the Embassy network which had originally inspired the idea in the wake of the Chilean earthquake in 2009.  It also included Parliaments and Parliamentarians; Ministries and Ministers; Royal Households and Family members; religious organizations and figures; civil society organizations and leaders; NGOs and journalists; and the occasional individual who had no division to turn to but ours to get help or advice.  

But it all began with diplomacy – and this is important.  Indeed, crucial.  Because it was when the emphasis on diplomacy was replaced by an emphasis on elections and elected officials that the entire structure broke down, resulting in a low-point in the entire tech sector’s reputation and public respect, which is only just now being re-imagined and re-built against the backdrop of the COVID crisis, when reliance and usage of social media platforms is one of the most valuable assets we have at our fingertips to remain connected, keep abreast of our family, friends, and colleagues’ latest news, and stay both informed and entertained. 

Taking a step back from the arc of time for a moment, it’s important first to understand how it is that tech companies are structured.  First and foremost, of course, come the engineers.  The tech company is their empire, initially, and all that matters is exponential user growth based on the products they code.  The better the product, the more people like it, and the more they invite their networked friends to like it, leading to exponential growth.  Scale is the goal.  With scale come hard-to-replace networks.  And with these networks come dependence, reliance, and resilience against competition.  Time spent on the platforms increase, and advertising “real estate” is more valuable to companies searching to land their messages with new audiences.  It thus follows that after the engineers come the sales team.  These teams craft the critical “monetization” strategies which enable tech firms to invest in expensive engineers, perks, and benefits to sustain high growth and constantly, relentlessly innovate to keep pace with the dynamic and fast-moving environment that is driven by a highly-changeable series of lines of code versus highly-static lines of physical production.  

Around these two core pillars: that of the engineer and that of the sales team to foot the bill on the highly-coveted Silicon Valley lifestyle, come the other divisions.  One of them, Communications & Public Policy, was a distinct innovation from a Silicon Valley school of thought.  Whereas many corporations will route Public Policy with and through a Legal department, the likes of Google and Facebook separated Legal and Public Policy.  This meant that the teams responsible for PR – for deflecting negative press and highlighting a positive “message” – were direct business partners of the teams responsible for relationship-building with policymakers and civil society leaders.  Both of these functions ultimately route through an executive chain of command that is responsible for sales, monetization strategy, new business, and revenue growth.  

Already, it is evident that a number of serious challenges emerge within this model.  First, and simultaneously obvious yet subtle, is that good public policy and relationship-building with policymakers is rarely – if ever – quantifiable in the short term.  What might begin as a single cup of coffee with a policymaker will take countless more rounds of coffee – and through these conversations ultimately mutual understanding and long-earned trust is yielded.  These discussions – this trust – this ability for frank and open dialogue will, at some stage in any relationship, bear fruit when a crisis hits, a tough decision has to be made, or a new course of policies must be debated, hashed out, and codified.  But in the meantime, it’s coffee and conversation.  And perhaps the occasional peanuts and glass of wine.  If this is starting to sound an awful lot like the art of traditional state-actor diplomacy, it is.  If done well, the role of an effective public policy team for corporations is more akin to an ambassadorial role than it is to a research-based legal role or a wordsmithing communications role.  Conversations that build trust for the flow of sound information is the holy grail of a corporate diplomatic corps.      

The trouble is, measurements of success at tech firms are not set up to track against the forward progress of a diplomatic unit.  Gut feelings based on trusted relationships built off countless conversations over endless rounds of tea do not fit within the framework of how the sales executive at the top structures his or her world-view.  Often trained in the MBA school of thought, the business executive at the top is looking for a chart – a graph – numbers – data.  This is chronically problematic, to the point that it inhibits a good policy person from doing his or her job and has resulted in some of the deepest blind spots within the governance of tech firms.  

As one example, I well-remember the day that the MBA-trained executive team out of Facebook’s Washington, DC office decided to introduce thirteen categories of color-coded criteria from which to base a certain program we were running on the Politics & Government team.  The chart, nick-named “Stoplight”, made visual sense.  Red!  Green!  Yellow!  Three easy-to-process illustrations, yet utterly unhelpful to the business at hand.  The charts took ages to design, and the business-minded leadership team loved counting the colors.  Yet these charts stood in the way of the real breadth and depth of the program, which was based on conversations with politicians – conversations that could be evaluated through description but not through color-coding. 

We thus immediately see that a public policy team must mirror the art of the diplomacy more than it mirrors the mastery of a data-crunching business unit.  The most talented corporate diplomats I’ve come across in my career are those who can inform a company how a policymaker is likely to react (“he has to give the speech to save face, but in the end he will not do anything drastic beyond the talk”), or who can convey an intuition built on patterns that emerge from decades of conversations (“the rhetoric coming from the fringe Parliamentary groups is changing; we need to watch this very carefully”).  Just as good diplomats use conversational aplomb and relationship-building to gather and convey intelligence, so leaders in corporate public policy must be empowered to do the same.  The trouble is, they are not.  So long as these functions route through a sales organization, which weighs the number as having greater value than the relationship, akin to a stockbroker on a trading floor versus an artist capturing the public imagination, the true ability for the art of diplomacy to flourish within the ranks of the corporation will be severely diminished, in ways that we have already seen have lasting reputational impacts on 21st-century corporations.  Secretary of States report directly to the Presidential office.  The highest-ranking corporate diplomat ought to report straight to the CEO at a tech firm.   

The second, and equally alarming challenge that wedges itself between effective corporate diplomacy and the C-Suite is this trend of marrying the public policy (i.e. “diplomatic”) arm of the business with the PR division.  A good PR team will avoid the negative headline at any cost.  Best not to say anything in case the journalist picks up on the one negative word in an otherwise positive phrase.  Or best to deflect anything sincerely worrying, for fear of the headline it might yield.  A privacy breach hits the press, and the well-trained spokesperson will immediately begin to react on auto-pilot: “We take privacy seriously.”  

The problem, of course, is that many areas of corporate diplomacy must dive into tricky, sensitive, and even societally-dangerous issues.  Identifying these issues and teasing them out to seed within networks that can potentially help come up with best-in-class solutions should be a key goal of any effective corporate diplomacy team.  One leading example that springs to my mind comes from a conversation in Geneva with the International Organization for Migration.  Facebook had recently launched its new initiative to connect parts of the world that were entirely off-the-grid in terms of Internet access.  Overall, connecting otherwise “dark” regions of the world is very exciting.  Contemplating the exchange in ideas, business models and markets, and global perspectives that spring from the well of previously un-heard voices is on the whole immensely powerful.  

But there is a counter-narrative on the margin of this otherwise empowering tale, and it is the job of the International Organization for Migration to anticipate these challenges.  How does the world prepare for an unprecedented number of not only good actors, but also bad actors, accessing global social media networks, for the first time?  How do we start to build resilience to protect our societies from the dangerous and inevitable rise in scams, trolling, and misinformation that will inevitably spike in the wake of such exponential increase?  Before these topics would become reputationally-damaging for tech companies, they had already emerged in discrete circles.  Before they blindsided and alarmed the world at large – from policymakers to individual populations using these platforms – these issues needed to be placed on the table and properly addressed.  Corporate diplomats today must navigate the uneasy but necessary business of seeding controversial and seemingly insurmountable challenges to canvass for ideas, garner broad support, and crowdsource solutions created by exponential-growth challenges.  “Things are not going so well, and this will be highly problematic” are not words that a well-trained PR team has filed away in their list of “lines to take” when crisis hits.  But they are lines that a good intelligence officer will regularly communicate to a diplomat.  Corporate diplomats must be de-coupled from their well-meaning but carefully-curated PR teams in order to be empowered to engage in tough conversations in a meaningful way.  These conversations can be uncomfortable, but they are necessary and failing to address them only causes greater reputational damage in the long term.  

We have now established that corporations must do two things differently to enable for an effective diplomatic corps within their ranks: first, teams responsible for corporate diplomacy (the “public policy” team), must dissociate itself from the sales-driven chain-of-command and route straight to a CEO, as their greatest value is often less quantitative and more qualitative.  When a diplomat attempts to quantify her art, she misses the entire point of the greatest value she can provide.  Second, corporate diplomats must divorce themselves from their long-term relationship with PR teams.  The intelligence on the ground – not the communications narrative – must inform their opinions and their recommendations to executive leadership.  Diplomats who couch their recommendations in PR-speak are, by definition, curtailing their own effectiveness in articulating the issues that would be of most benefit for the corporation to understand, anticipate, address, and resolve, before these issues spiral out of control.  Sometimes, this may mean that the corporate diplomat is the one tasked with communicating not-so-great news to the general public in the spirit of modern public diplomacy.  This can and should be encouraged.  If we can encourage such teams to speak more freely about the challenges they are hearing about from their sources – even if no scalable solution is readily-available, we have the opportunity to harness the collective imaginations, skillsets, and ideas of millions of well-meaning individuals to help us sort through major societal challenges together.  

In large part, this “public diplomacy” arm of a corporate team is the most valuable, most nuanced, but also most revolutionary of all.  Today’s world is filled with people who have the ability to crowd-source solutions to major challenges.  For every issue requiring expert opinion and advice, there are exponentially more individuals who can provide this opinion and advice than we have previously had access to.  A classic example comes from the world of healthcare.  Despite unease for collecting data on personal health, at a point in time when ultimately we can leverage data at scale for proper analysis, we will shape a brighter future for research, diagnosis, and treatment.       

Similarly, corporate public policy challenges now often not only benefit from – but demand – the participation of a broader public.  Whether social media takedown policies or ESG (environmental, social, governance) best-practices, the trend towards greater collaboration between a wide variety of stakeholders and corporate boards and decision-makers is clear.  On balance, corporate public policy teams have been slow to react to this trend. 

An excellent example of the power in interfacing in greater public diplomacy as a policy team comes via civil society leaders and activists.  In the world of social media, civil society and activists were much earlier at adopting new technologies for communication than their counterparts in government and policymaking spheres.  Part of this has to do with the fact that the activist community has less to lose by taking risks in new spaces, and everything to gain.  Decentralized experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking is part of a successful activist strategy and will ultimately disrupt the very information environments that often provoke activists in the first instance.  An oppressive political regime, for example, will give rise to a fringe group of civil society leaders pioneering new policies and values.  These groups will need to use newer spaces of communication in order to get their messages heard, as traditional methods of communication (print, radio, TV) are state-controlled, monitored, or even just expensive to use.  Similarly, global organizations like Radio Free Europe or Reporters Without Borders will use new forms of communication to gather and disseminate information amongst supporters and informants.  

While traditional government and policymaking institutions were still navigating their way through the brave new world of social media communications, these activists and civil society organizations were getting very, very good at understanding the opportunities, the limitations and indeed even dangers of a globally-connected world.  Female activists in the Middle East credited social media platforms with giving them the courage they needed to take a stand in their own countries.  Without seeing the successes of women in other countries making an impact, many believed they wouldn’t have been brave enough to pursue their own activist agendas.  This behavior clearly showed the power of an interconnected world to inspire and poke holes in the flow of news, information, and ideas that are often subject to either very careful and restrictive curation, or simply not reported owing to competition amongst thousands of other stories getting headline billing. 

Meanwhile, activists were also amongst the first to spot the ability for misinformation to spread online, weaponized fake profiles to confuse public opinion, and the potential for social media platforms to seriously alter the political fabric of their countries.  As early as 2011, I was fielding questions about rumors spiraling out of control and influencing huge swaths of the general public from civil society leaders in Morocco, and navigating the relationship between Facebook and democracy from Arab Spring leaders in Egypt.  Technically, as a public policy representative at the time, it was not my official “job” to serve as an ambassador of the company to the civil society and activist leadership communities.  But thanks to an ecosystem that was quickly assembling around civil society and new technology, from Hillary Clinton’s Public Diplomacy initiatives that gave rise to “TechCamp” programs sponsored by the U.S. State Department, to Yahoo’s “Change the World” conferences in the wake of the Arab Spring, reaching out to and connecting with civil society was not only as relevant as reaching out to and connecting with government: it was also as important.  It was these leaders who had their pulse on the future, because they were fearless enough to experiment with emerging technologies.  

The problem, of course, is that in a traditional corporate environment, these leaders typically carry less weight than a Minister or Member of Parliament.  And so while Ministers and MPs were looking at terrorism and tax, monopolies and data privacy; civil society leaders were examining the role of misinformation and manipulation, trust and societal disruption.  All of these themes needed to be addressed, yet public policy teams born out of a more traditional corporate mold focused on and prioritized the former, related more to classical bilateral / statesman diplomacy, as the voices raising these concerns came from traditional spheres of influence, whether Capitol Hill, Westminster, or Bundestag.  

The latter suite of issues would, in the long-run, become more reputationally-damaging both for mainstream users and for policymakers, but emerged from non-traditional spheres of influence dependent on a strong ecosystem of public diplomacy which didn’t exist at the time, and thus the themes emerging from Rainbow Street, Amman and Zamalek, Cairo, were perceived as interesting and potentially anecdotally useful, without being mission-critical to the long-term success of the diplomatic corps and ultimately the company.  

In fact, it wouldn’t be until large-scale revelations hit closer to home to the Silicon Valley, that these issues would be taken seriously at last.  Cambridge Analytica, Russian intervention in U.S. elections, and the rise of extremist and conspiracy-theory world-views at an exponentially-alarming rate would finally jolt tech firms to paying attention to issues that were already clearly-articulated and identified as being serious challenges to social order and the future of connected populations by civil society leaders as early as 2011.  A five-year runway is a very long time by tech startup standards: more than enough time to fix broken chains of command and processes that impeded the flow of information from the diplomatic corps with ears to the ground.    

We have thus far established three principles of effective corporate diplomacy: first, that the diplomatic corps of corporations must not report into any function but the office of the CEO.  Second, that they must be entirely distinct from a PR team.  Third, that they must place an equal emphasis on traditional relationships with policymakers and civil society leaders alike, in order to spot, identify, anticipate, and respond to emerging threats that are spotted more accurately in the margins of society than in the halls of the highest government offices.  

There is now a fourth pillar we must analyze, and that is the relationship between the corporate diplomatic corps and the state policymakers in government.  In the world of Silicon Valley technology, user growth to produce networks that in turn produce exponential scale are the most effective way of producing investor and shareholder value.  This means that users outside the United States of America are critical to a definitive success story.  A tech firm that aspires to an IPO or acquisition that exceeds the expectations of its investors, leadership team, and employees who trade salary and benefit perks for stock that is meaningless until the iconic pressing of the NASDAQ button, must grow its user base as broadly and as internationally as possible.  As an example of scale, more than 3 billion people around the world now use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp every single month – all part of the broader Facebook ownership.  

What this means is that the corporate diplomatic corps’ public diplomacy constituencies represent a new class of a fiercely global community.  Within traditional diplomatic circles representing state-to-state diplomacy, there is a palpable tension between two schools of thought: one is that we might get a global community on board to work towards a collective vision and mission in the spirit of the United Nations.  The other is that we must establish a core set of values, and invite countries to join us if they are “with us”. At a recent Kinross House Meeting on cyber security, participants from around the world never did agree on which approach was preferred: there were too many stark disagreements between nations.  Some – and particularly emerging markets - fervently argued that the future lies in global, or near-global, consensus.  Others argued that in the context of cyber security, near-global consensus is a pipe-dream doomed for failure: too many large state actors are at odds to the extent that a set of values must dictate which “side” one is on.  

There is, however, another way forward, which emerges from the art of public diplomacy and an unofficial but very robust supranational global population.  This essentially turns the traditional model upside-down, looking at the trends already emerging from the a-national populous on global platforms, and extrapolating from these trends positive and negative values to produce the policies that are needed to keep these values in check or enable them to flourish.  Understanding these trends and building the arc of these values from them is an entirely new skillset for a corporate diplomatic corps, and it is one of the most critical skills our world today needs to master.  Tech companies which operate social networks at scale must deploy their diplomatic corps to do a far better job of informing policymakers as to emerging trends in our societies, so as to ensure better, more anticipatory policymaking.  We must remember that individual populations are now more connected to each other than at any point in history: a Black Lives Matter protest in the United States will immediately trigger marches half-way around the world.  We must do better at networking global circles to help governments better anticipate social trends.  Corporate diplomats should be responsible for bringing these conversations together.  What currently happens – and is not in my opinion helpful – is a public policy team member (“corporate diplomat”) will be invited to participate in one of these round tables.  They will be equipped with their talking points as signed-off by the PR team, deliver these carefully-crafted lines, and then depart.  This level of participation has failed to enter into a new realm of leadership in corporate diplomacy as re-imagined by the tech sector.  The corporate diplomatic corps must instead pick up the banner of global leadership, creating new ways to channel societal trends as they emerge from connected platforms into the halls of government decision-makers, so as to create an ecosystem of policymaking that is more relevant to the 21st century – and better harnesses the data and tools to which we now have access.   

Equally critical is the role and responsibility for corporate diplomats to guide governments and policymakers as to who ought to serve as the informant or spokesperson from inside the corporation on sensitive topics.  Legions of individuals at tech firms will specialize in content policy and guidelines.  They are the individuals who see, each and every day, millions of violations of these policies.  They understand the challenges and the nuances of writing and enforcing these policies.  They understand why they are in place and how they can be manipulated and abused.  In today’s current dispute between Facebook and Twitter, for example, on how content policy is enforced as it relates to the U.S. President, it is critical for specialists in this area to get into great nuance and detail as to how this content would be reviewed if the voice were not the U.S. President, but a public figure in another geographical theatre against a backdrop of platforms that tout globally-enforced policies.  Such debate is hard and it is challenging, but every tech company has individuals who specialize in very specific policy scenarios.  Typically, these individuals are not those who governments insist on speaking to: a policymaker will want to hear from the CEO or COO.  Yet while these leaders are ultimately responsible, they are not the subject area experts.  Nuancing the debate requires a less senior, but more well-informed informant. 

Corporate diplomats must do better to widen the bench of access policymakers have to engage in more detailed conversation with teams at tech companies who are at the heart of these issues.  They must help sign-post government leaders and the public to ensure that they are speaking to the right experts to help inform and nuance policy debates, even if these experts seem less “senior” than a C-Suite executive. 

Corporate diplomacy as defined through the lens of the 21st-century tech firm is charting new territory in untested waters.  As so much of state diplomacy has been weakened by increasingly volatile or populist-driven agendas, we need a strong corporate diplomatic corps more than ever to find new ways of promoting and strengthening positive values that benefit the collective democratic spirit of our age, re-enshrining these values in our societies for a digital era.  This responsibility ought not to be taken lightly.  During my years as a Facebook diplomat, there were times when my company and my CEO were given more trust than that of a local population’s government.  A specific case arose in Moldova, when a young student asked me whether Facebook could start issuing marriage licenses when Moldovans changed their relationship status from being “in a relationship” to “engaged.”  In a very sincere, very rational way, the young man explained how corrupt, expensive, and time consuming this process was in his own country’s governance structure; and how easy, simple, cheap, and straightforward it could be if Mark Zuckerberg could just take over the process from California – a half a world away but a process that garnered more trust than the government office a few buildings down from where he was asking the question. In his mind, this made perfect sense and was not even a radical suggestion.  His values aligned to those of an efficient corporation, and so his common sense dictated that the corporation could just fix this broken policy process.  That this new policy was suggested not through the lens of state-to-state (i.e., from Moldova to the United States of America), but state-to-corporate (i.e., from Moldova to Facebook), is illustrative of a wider point.  Whether or not tech firms fully admit and embrace this trend, populations globally frequently ascribe to them the policymaking powers and gravitas of a state.  While legally and structurally this is not the case, it must inform a new way of thinking for corporate diplomacy.  Corporate diplomacy must be debated much more than it currently is at the board room level.  It must be given significantly more power to have bolder, more visionary impact, not only because the corporate itself needs these voices for more effective governance, but because our societies need this new strand of global leadership.   

As a practice, corporate diplomacy at tech companies has historically fallen short of its potential.  There is scope for a better approach through fixing broken chains of command; re-aligning corporate ambassadors with a different set of key business partners; opening their scope to better include a wider variety of non-state actors; and encouraging a new path forward to build a corporate framework around the resilience of healthy societies in retreat. 

The art of diplomacy goes against the grain of so much of what the corporate machine values, promotes, and lauds.  Business lunches are out; metrics and charts are in.  The liberal arts education is out; the STEM subjects are in.  Yet behind the curtain of so many of the most transformative moments in history are the tireless hours that go into building trust and opening dialogue; establishing relationships that have less to do with transactional shareholder value and more to do with better understanding of people and societies.  This is the world of diplomacy, and in its wake come the handshakes and the nods of agreement; respect and understanding; glimmers of peace and of making individuals, populations, and societies whole such that we are encouraged that the world can be a better place if we invest as much in the art of diplomacy as we do in the business of monetization.  After all, no matter how robust the monetization strategy, a reputational misstep along the way can spell the end of even the most carefully-laid advertising campaign.  Diplomats are the guardians of reputational management and can be the custodians of good governance.  If equipped with the latitudinal lines of new business partners and the longitudinal lines of sound chains of command, corporate diplomacy may just be an untapped resource of good, responsible, and fair leadership as pioneered by a new class of corporations that have as much – if not more – potential to re-build broken societies than state actors historically tasked with the agenda of protecting and preserving fair, resourceful, and productive societies.