🔥Communications Manager

The Communications Manager (or Comms Manager) is your central hub for managing multiple role-playing personas during an exercise. Instead of switching between channels, you can monitor and respond to all persona communications from one place.

It's especially useful in exercises role-players need to impersonate multiple personas. For personas with a full cognitive model, role-players can also set a persona to auto-respond using AI. Depending on the goals and experience of your training audience, auto-response might be best used for secondary or less crucial personas - freeing human role-players to manage leading personas.

Benefit	Feature
Easier to manage multiple impersonations	See all incoming and outgoing messages across assigned personas Reply manually as a persona, or let AI handle responses automatically Monitor multiple social channels (MicroBlog [Twitter/X], GoSocial [Facebook], InstaMedia [Instagram], Telegraph [Telegram], Website/News [Browser], Forum [Reddit])

How does it work?

Behavioural Simulation Engine (Conducttr's 4Rs Model)

Comms Manager uses Conducttr's 4Rs model to power persona decision-making:

• Is the request RELEVANT?

• Does it RESONATE?

• How should I REACT?

• What's my RESPONSE?

This pipeline guides how personas process incoming messages, ensuring their responses stay true to their cognitive model and in-character persona.

Designing

⚡Before running the Comms Manager in Social Watch, work through this setup checklist:

• Activate the Social Watch channel and ensure that Autonomous Personas (Auto) is toggled on

• To get the most credible AI-generated responses, complete the scenario description and ensure it provides adequate exercise context. Personas must have full cognitive models

To find out more about persona attributes, visit the page below:

Working with personas

• Persona permissions and player positions need to be aligned for the human players to gain access to the persona

Set up positions in Configuration > Positions

You can also assign positions to personas directly

Pre-assign positions to players in your teams table

Assign positions during a live exercise from the Teams tab of your Facilitator Dashboard

• Set up Social Graph (social media following relationships between personas) which affects message visibility

Example Social Graph manipulated in Excel

To find out more about Social Graph, visit the page below:

🔥Social Graph

If any of these steps are incomplete, players may not see the right personas or messages during the exercise.

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Running

Getting started

When you first open Social Watch in an exercise you'll be met with this Get Started window:

To use the Comms Manager, select Impersonate Persona:

Setting up your column

1. Select Sender: choose the persona you want to impersonate from the dropdown. You'll only see personas Facilitators/designers have assigned to you

2. Filter by channels (optional): limit monitoring to specific channels

3. Choose your response mode (see below)

To add another column, click + Add column and repeat the process.

Response modes

1. Impersonation (manual)

Monitor all incoming messages and replies yourself.

Player messages are highlighted with a green Player tag so they're easy to spot. Click Reply to open the Composer and type your response, or use the AI sparkles button to generate one based on context you describe.

2. Auto respond

AI automatically replies on behalf of the persona based on their cognitive profile.

This is useful when managing several personas at once. You can still see everything that's sent.

Auto respond is currently available for MicroBlog (X/Twitter) and Email only. You can only select one channel per persona per column when using this mode.

An example of an Autonomous Persona in action

Replying as a persona

Click Reply on any message to open the Composer. From here you can:

• Type a response manually

• Click Generate Response to get an AI-drafted reply (you'll need to briefly describe the situation/context)

You can address replies to any player or persona using the To and CC fields.

Useful things to know

MIND state

Navigate to the ✏️ pencil icon for the Composer > 📖 Mind:

Each persona has an emotional state that influences how they respond. It updates throughout the exercise as interactions build up.

Here you'll also be able to see Relationship, Memory summary, MIND state, and FACTS.

FACTS

Concrete information (road closures, policy rules, operational updates) can be added to a persona's knowledge base mid-exercise to keep AI responses accurate.

Relationships

Click Relationships to view the relationship history between personas:

Comms Manager tracks how personas and players interact over time, shaping the tone of AI-generated responses.

Exercise context

Navigate to the cog icon:

If the scenario shifts during the exercise, you can update the AI's context, without needing to back into the Editor.