Social Support is a program made up of a group of diverse volunteers and staff that supports Firefox users in the social network, mainly on Twitter. The goal of the program is to advocate for the Firefox user and provide a positive and personal support experience for users reaching out directly to the Mozilla Brand.

This program is for both the casual Twitter users as well as for users dedicated to replying to the Firefox Brand. It is great for everyone who is looking for:

• Leadership experience for communities on social media
• Opportunity to learn some of the technology used to manage personal social media brands
• Opportunity to learn about a personal brand
• Community building and networking
• Experience of teaching users and yourself about Mozilla products and online technology

Please follow along and read all the way to the end to understand more about the community culture and the program guidelines and to find out if this sounds like it is for you.

Social Support Culture

To be able to practice the culture, it’s important to understand our program goal.

Program Goal: To answer questions about Mozilla’s open source products and their latest releases, promote a positive and open experience as an advocate for the open web.

Some of the general rules for the culture of the Social Support community are:

• Please be compassionate, not evil.
• Please do not spam the brand accounts or associate community accounts, it will be deleted and removed.
• Please Respect the Brand of Mozilla and Firefox.
• Please do not be passive, rude, or disrespectful to anyone interacting with you or the Mozilla Brand accounts while participating in the program.
• If the conversation gets passionate, please feel free to take a walk or take a break, your personal well being is more important.
• Please avoid political topics, controversial and political campaign hashtags. Mozilla is a global company that interacts with many types of people from different types of places.
• Please be nice to one another and follow the same guidelines when working alongside the community as those mentioned in Mozilla Support rules and guidelines.

How do I get involved?

There are 2 levels of involvement in the Social Support program. If you’re just starting out, you can use your personal account and use the recommended TweetDeck tool or Twitter Search to casually contribute to users who are looking for help in a Mozilla product as well as advocate for the product in your network.

Once you’re experienced enough on #fxhelp, you can then apply to the next level of contribution in the Social Support program. A contributor on this level can get access to the Conversocial tool and could answer from our official account, @FirefoxSupport. A contributor must complete two weeks of the first level of involvement to be considered for this set of contributions. The different Roles can be reviewed in detail, in Social Support - Contributor roles.

Social Support with Tweetdeck/Twitter Search

Setting up a workspace on Tweetdeck or using Twitter Search is a great and easy way to start contributing to Social Support. You just need to remember one thing, don't forget to include your reply with #fxhelp.

Setting up the tool

Depending on your liking, there are 2 recommended setups: using Tweetdeck or Twitter Search. Please see this article: Social Support - Configure tools and workspace to see how you can configure your tool/workspace to contribute to the Social Support program as well as how you can find support tweets from your setup.

Finding support tweets

There are a lot of spams and noises on Twitter (not to mention the abundance of memes!). Just in case you want to read a bit more about identifying a user looking for support on social media, we have provided a few descriptions and a visual guide. This is an example of someone looking for help:

Some other characteristics of a support issue in Social Media are:

• A user says, “I need help”
• A user mentions that a part of Firefox is not working as expected
• A user asks when a feature in Firefox will work again (this is our example above.)
• If you are still stuck try this guide: When to respond to a controversial tweet as a Firefox Advocate.

Responding from a personal account

Generally, we don’t restrict our contributors to reply from their personal accounts (even if they have access to reply from our official account). There’s just one rule that we’d like to emphasize, which is to include #fxhelp in their reply.

There are few contributor’s-driven accounts like Random Firefox User and Emma Tweets Tech that have gained public recognition for their expertise on Mozilla’s products. In general, we allow these types of accounts as long as they don’t pretend to be an official account and don’t spread false information about our products.

There are also other benefits of using a personal account. One of them being the freedom to recommend unofficial fixes, which we wouldn’t suggest from our official account.

Social Support with Conversocial

If you’ve passed the two weeks incubation period on #fxhelp, you can apply to get access on Conversocial through this form. With Conversocial, a contributor would be able to reply from our official account, @FirefoxSupport. But before applying, make sure that you meet the following criteria to get access to the tool.

Criteria to get access to Social Support on Conversocial

• You have at least 2 weeks of experience contributing to Social Support using #fxhelp
• Demonstrate a good sense of support skill and respect to users
• Provide clear instructions and objective responses
• Showing interest in improving your responses and seek feedback from other team members
• Show responsibility for how you speak and how you act on social networks, even if it is your personal account
• You have signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)

Create an mzl.la shortened link

With the limited characters we have when posting on social media, shorten link become a need. Here's how you can create an mzl.la shortened link from a KB article:

1. Go to https://bit.ly
2. In the Shorten your link field, paste the link you would like to shorten.
3. Click Shorten.

Bitly will recognize that the destination belongs to Mozilla and provide you with an mzl.la shortened link

Common Answers

There’s a built-in feature in Conversocial to use common responses. But, if you’re a casual contributor using a personal account, you can also use the following document: Social Support Common Replies.

Getting help

Do not worry, you are not alone. Somebody is always online somewhere. If you find yourself stuck and need to collaborate, there are a couple of resources that are available.

1. You can check out the existing documentation for product tips in support.mozilla.org, just use the search box in the top right of this page.
2. Check out some of the experienced contributor’s responses, they should be setting a good example. Look in the forums or for a reply with a signature from @firefox, @firefox_es, @firefox_de, or @firefox_fr.
3. You can also ask for a consult by posting your tweet and thoughts in the Contributor's Forum to get the community help:
4. Start here and give them 72 hours to respond
5. There is also a Matrix room where you can ping active contributors in the room.

How to escalate or report a bug

Social Support Escalation Process

When to escalate

• If you notice that there are more than one person asking the same/similar question.
• If a question gets a lot of attention and there is no solution in the Knowledge Base.
• If the question is related to a paid product.
• If a question/comment is related to Mozilla/Firefox brand and/or any team members or current events issues
• If you find other circumstances that you think need to be escalated, please PM the CMs.

How to escalate

If you’re a Casual Social Helper contributor, there is a forum you can ask for help, where most moderators and admin for the program are subscribed to and check on a regular basis. See this thread for more instructions.

If you’re a Social Support Contributor or a Social Support Wrangler on Conversocial, please refer to this article: Mobile and Social Support escalation process.

For other questions or concerns of anything that does not follow the guidelines above or the Mozilla Support rules and guidelines, please contact a moderator or an administrator. They can be reached on Matrix or the forums. For more information for how to get help in the forums add [Attn Admin] How the community can reach an Admin and when you might want to .

How to report a bug

If you are already familiar with Bugzilla and you have enough information from the user to file a bug, check out these resources: Contributors Guide to Writing a Good Bug and Mozilla/QA/Bug_writing_guidelines. There are also some training resources you can reach out to ehumphries on Matrix or even the component owner of each bugzilla component. Do not be afraid to ask.

Best practices

Best practices on posting replies

Keep in mind that when you are replying, you will most likely have the best experience and atain the program's goal if you follow these tips.

• When a user is angry for no specific reason and it is clear no answer or support will make them happy, you do not need to continue to interact with them.
  • For example: Tweets containing cursing, offensive word.
• We do not talk about politics so if a tweet has reference to politics, do not reply.
• Be sure to read the entire thread before writing a reply; this means you need to tailor all your answers to fit the user’s question instead of copying and pasting answers. We don’t want users to feel like they are getting an automatic response.
• SLOW DOWN - read your reply a few times before pushing send.
  • Double check your answer to ensure it is spelled properly and answers the correct question from the user.

Best practices from the community

There are even more tips that we have gathered over the years of providing support and from research from other industries’ social media support methods. These are best for balancing your free time and making sure you are still having fun. I have these as mantras on post-its on my keyboard.

1. You do not have to answer every single Tweet.
2. Please avoid controversial topics.
3. Please wait for a response, one reply is enough. If they don’t reply let it go.
4. If the user responds, don’t give them the same info again.
5. Please follow up if they reply, but know when to stop. If it is dark outside and you have to be up in the morning, stop. Seriously, go to bed.

Complete Social Support guidelines

If you're super interested in supporting Firefox users on social media (mainly, Twitter), please follow along these guidelines that will help explain how we do things:

• Social Support - Guidelines — an overview of how to get started on Social Support program. (You're here!)
• Social Support - Contributor roles — where you can learn more about various roles in Social Support program.
• Social Support - How to use the tool — a complete guideline on how to use features in Conversocial to reply to tweets from @FirefoxSupport.
  • Mobile and Social Support escalation process — guideline on how to escalate a tweet in Conversocial.
  • Social Support - Tagging guidelines — guideline on how to use tag in Conversocial.