Mozilla Support is a Social Support program made up of a group of diverse volunteers and staff that supports Firefox users in the social networks Facebook and 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.

Follow along and read all the way to the end to find out more about the community culture and guidelines to find out if this sounds like it is for you. Remember one thing, reply with #fxhelp

The Basics

Your 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 General rules for the culture of this sub-SUMO 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 Mozilal 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 type of people from different types of places.
• Please be nice to one another and follow the same guidelines when working along side the community as those mentioned in Forum Rules and Guidelines.

How involved would you like to be?

There are two levels of involvement. The first is by using your twitter account and the recommended TweetDeck tool to casually contribute to users who are looking for help in a Mozilla product as well as advocate for the product in your network.

The second set of contributions is done with the official Mozilla Brand Twitter and Facebook accounts by way of the Reply by Buffer tool. A user must complete two weeks of the first to be considered for this set of contributions. The different Roles can be reviewed in detail, in Social Support - Contributor roles.

Finding Tweets and the Tools to Do it

There are two recommended setups, depending on your likeing. Please open up this article in another browser to set yourself up, [Support Tools and Workspace]

SO what does a support tweet look like?

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 description. This is an example of someone looking for help:

Tips: here’s a few best practices to keep in mind:

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.

Some tips 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.

Where do I start with common answers?

We have even more resources for you. Did I mention you can always come back to this article. At this point I would take a break. When you are back from your break, you will learn that the social support program originally created common responses in a google sheet. However it was hard to find and not used very much. As Army of Awesome comes to a close see this bug, all of the common reponses were updated and put in this document: Common Responses.

How do I get help?

Do now worry, you are not alone. There is someone always online. 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, @firefoxbrasil, @firefox_es 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:
   1. start here and give them 72 hours to respond
4. There is also a live irc channel in irc.mozilla.org you can ping active users in the channel.
5. There is a telegram group where the The Offcial Social Helpers in Reply hang out in. Send a private message to guigs if at this point if you have not recieved an email from guigs.

Where and When to Escalate or Find More Help?

Support is a very common task that industries need to continue the lifecycle of a product they are selling or developing. At Mozilla, most of its products are open source and are free. Many of the efforts and resources that are used to change and maintain the product are from volunteers like you. So we want to make sure we have as much support for you as possible. If there is an issue that cannot be resolved interpersonally, and requires developer help, an authoritative figure or just simply has you stumped, there is an escalation path.

For questions on specific comments in Facebook or Tweets, 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. For other questions, or concerns of anything that do not follow the guidelines above or the Forum Rules and Guidelines, please contact a moderator and an administrator. They can be reached in IRC or in the forums. For more information for how to get help in the forums add [Attn:Admin] to the topic title. More: [Attn Admin] How the community can reach an Admin and when you might want to

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

I am really liking this, it has been two weeks, how do I get access to the Reply Tool and become a Social Helper?

The criteria for being added are as follows:

• You have at least 2 weeks experience using #fxhelp, and are an active contributor for about a month, maybe sooner.
• You provide respectful attention and support to users
• You provide clear instructions and objective responses;
• You show an interest in improving your responses, and seek feedback from other team members in the telegram channel or by message and posts in the Social Media contributor forum.
• You show responsibility for how you speak and how you act on social networks, even if it is your personal account.

For any other questions email guigs [at] mozilla [dot] com (this will change once we have written the moderator guidelines ;-))

See you soon!