Social engagement guidelines

This playbook outlines the processes and practices used to engage with the Mattermost community across social community channels.

Goal

Earn trust and improve the Mattermost brand by responding to all Mattermost mentions and questions asked online in a timely manner. We want to help members of the community with their questions, but also making sure that the community is heard and that the feedback from the community reaches the rest of the team at Mattermost.

Expectations

The Community Team is responsible for monitoring and responding to mentions across social media. However, mentions will often require input from someone with specific domain knowledge to ensure we give an accurate response. In these cases, it is expected for subject matter experts within the company to help the community team craft responses.

We understand that everyone is busy, and that these types of requests can often seem like an unnecessary interruption. To mitigate this, the Community Team does the following before asking for assistance:

1. Search the documentation, Mattermost, the forum, and GitHub issues to see if the question/concern has already been answered.

2. Redirect the user to more appropriate support channels if the mention seems like it will require in-depth analysis or excessive back-and-forth.

This allows us to respond to the majority of our mentions without help, but there are still times when input from subject matter experts can help us respond much more quickly and accurately.

Can you help respond to this?

We're asking for help responding to this comment so we can ensure we give the best possible answer as quickly as possible. We want to make sure the wider community has the best possible experience when reaching out to us online.

General guidelines

Adopted from https://handbook.mattermost.com/contributors/contributors/community-playbook#response-writing-tips

Ultimately, when responding to users you should always keep the Golden Rule in mind -- if you were the person on the other end, how would you want someone to respond to you?

1. Be professional

   • Maintain professionalism in your responses, as you are speaking as a member of the company. Avoid slang or colloquialisms that may not translate well across other languages.

   • Do not use humor in your responses, as it can be received in the wrong way by the community. Instead, stay factual when answering questions.

2. Don't answer if unsure

   • Ask someone who knows the answer instead of replying with an assumption or incomplete understanding.

   • Don't be afraid to reroute if you don't have the answer and are having trouble figuring it out. A good place to start is the Mattermost peer-to-peer help channel.

3. Choose over-communication vs. under-communication

   • Providing as much knowledge, context, and documentation up-front can reduce the number of interactions needed for the conversation to be satisfied.

   • Make reducing frustration a priority; e.g., if you need to ask someone else for an answer and think it might take some time to discuss, inform the user so they can expect a delayed response.

4. Don't make promises

   • Avoid saying “we’ll work on it” or something similar that sets expectations that aren’t met later. Instead, direct them to our Feature Proposal Page or Bug Filing Page if applicable.

5. Choose positivity over negativity

   • Turn a missing feature into an invitation to share a feature idea to be upvoted.

   • Avoid excuses like “we’re busy” or “our team is small."

6. Do your best to link documentation as answers

   • Links to documentation allow answers to be easily updated dynamically as documentation is updated.

   • Any questions that should be answered in docs that aren’t should turn into tickets to create that documentation (with a link to the ticket included in the response).

7. Keep community end-user information secure

   • If you come across a post that includes the person's IP address, domain name, or other information you think should not be disclosed publicly, edit the post to remove this information. Then click the hide revision button so that your edits won't be visible to others on the forum.

8. Be welcoming and thankful

   • When asking someone to take action, use "Would you be open to..." instead of "Would you like to...".

   • Communities really respond well to being praised and thanked for their work.

Community Forums

Below are guidelines or processes for specific forums we engage with the Mattermost community.

Twitter

Intended outcomes

1. Likes and loves: Every promoter feels appreciated (like, heart, etc.) and we have acknowledged the best content (re-tweet, quoted re-tweet, mention, shout out, replies, * humor, etc.).

2. Listening and respond: Everyone with a relevant question gets a reply in 1 business day (except trolls).

3. Data, learning, and iteration: Understand how we're doing week-to-week, what we've learned, and how we'll up-level our approach.

Workflow

1. Monitor Twitter channel in Mattermost Contributors Team and this search query.

2. Respond to questions, retweet, and like posts that we are tagged in per the guidelines outlined above.

   • For product inquiries you are uncertain how to answer, you may escalate by at-mentioning @pmteam in the Twitter channel header.

3. Update posts in the Twitter channel with action taken.

   • React with :heart: if you liked the post.

   • React with :repeat: if you retweeted the post.

   • React with :no_entry_sign: if you took no action.

Response writing tips

1. Avoid acronyms. Avoid acronyms when possible. For example, say "pull request" instead of "PR", since only a subset of tweet readers are active GitHub users.

2. Use the active voice. Avoid "has", "was", "have been" when possible. For example, instead of "Hackfest has started!" say "Hackfest starts now!"

3. Include at most one link. To provide a clear call to action, include at most one link per tweet and place it near the end of the tweet.

4. Use exclamation marks only for exciting announcements. An exclamation mark can be used when the announcement is exciting, but using an exclamation mark should be avoided when it can be confused with a signal for the community to panic, e.g. "Security update released!".

Sample responses

1. Asks for more information such as a preview of our product.

   • Thank you for your interest in Mattermost. You can learn more about us at https://mattermost.com where you can also download a trial of our product.

2. Asks for a specific feature or group of features.

   • Multiple feature requests: Thank you for the suggestions @username. Would you be open to contributing them in the feature idea forum so they can reviewed by our Product Management team? We use the collective feedback of our users to influence the future of the project. What Matters to You Portal

   • Single feature request: Thank you for the suggestion @username. Would you be open to contributing it in the feature idea forum so it can reviewed by our Product Management team? We use the collective feedback of our users to influence the future of the project. What Matters to You Portal

   • Planned feature request: Thank you for your feedback. We're excited to share that [feature] will be available in our [edition] Edition soon. Please see our forum post for more information: [link to forum post].

   • Shipped feature request: Thank you for your feedback. Mattermost already supports [feature]. You can learn more about it in our documentation: [link to docs].

3. Feedback about their experience, not specific to a feature or a product.

   • Appreciate the feedback. If your team has suggestions on how to improve Mattermost, we'd love to hear more in our feature proposal forum. Would you be open to contributing them in the feature idea forum so they can reviewed by our Product Management team? We use the collective feedback of our users to influence the future of the project. What Matters to You Portal

   • Thanks @{username}, highly appreciate your feedback. If you have additional feedback about your experience, we'd love to hear. You can share at https://forum.mattermost.com) to start a discussion.

4. Tweet of forum post, asking someone from Mattermost team to respond.

   • Thank you for reaching out. Our team responded to you in the forums and we're happy to help with further questions there. or

   • Thank you for reaching out. Our team monitors and responds to forum inquiries. We're happy to help with further questions there.

5. Customer asking for help to address an issue they are having with a deployment or specific feature in the system.

   • Thank you for reaching out. We recommend opening a support ticket where our team can best help you troubleshoot the issue. For more information about Enterprise Edition support levels, see https://mattermost.com/support/.

What do we retweet?

1. Pictures of swag

   • If there’s a lot of swag posts at once (e.g., socks), be careful not to retweet all of them to clutter our timeline.

   • Try to retweet an assortment of different swag types.

2. Announcements about new plugins from the community

3. Industry reports that mention Mattermost

   • E.g., “Best collaboration software for 2021”

4. Third-party content about using Mattermost

   • E.g., “Mattermost Recipes” not written by Mattermost.

5. Announcements about upcoming events we will be attending

6. Pro-Mattermost posts from team/community members.

LinkedIn

To be added.

YouTube

To be added.

HackerNews

To be added.

GitHub

To be added.

Discourse

To be added.

Reddit

To be added.

StackOverflow

To be added.

How do I report inappropriate content in Mattermost community sites?

Content in any community site managed by Mattermost should follow the guidelines above. Content that is deemed to be controversial, offensive, potentially defamatory or infringing content from material distributed, broadcast, or posted on websites will be edited or removed.

We ask the community's help in reporting any such content to [e-mail].