Buffer Slack Community’s AMA with Patricia Wroblewski, Community & Customer Success at Mention
Hello here! Patricia Wroblewski from Mention will be starting her AMA with us now!
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What does she do: Patricia is responsible for Community and Customer Success at Mention since last October. She engages with Mention’s social community, schedules content and listens on social media. On the customer success side, she makes sure our users get the most out of their Mention plans.
Her background: She speaks fluently Polish, German and English and conversational Italian since she was born in Germany, spoke Polish at home, moved to Chicago when she was 16, lived 2 years in Italy, and 2 years in the Netherlands before she made it to Paris last year. She has a stereotypical Italian boyfriend, who she met during her internship at the UN in New York.
Others: Her favorite activities are browsing reddit and imgur while eating Italian cheese and enjoying Italian wine.
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Hello Patricia! Is there anything more you would like to share with us? Otherwise, we will start the AMA :)
Hi everyone! Thank you, Alfred Lua, for inviting me. So excited to speak with everyone :)
As my intro says I am doing community and customer success. Sometimes these two areas do intersect. A few things I do is taking care of our social accounts, sending out newsletters, replying to support questions (in the languages I speak), finding influencers/interesting users/fans, collecting feedback and sending out swags. If you would like to receive some Mention stickers, please DM me your address :)
Engaging with a community on Twitter can be hard, as you have to deal with people in different timezones tweeting at all hours of the day and night. How do you stay on top of mentions and respond in good time? — Ria Blagburn
Nice question :) Obviously scheduling tweets helps a lot, since most of our users and social audience is in the US and I also use a lot our own tool Mention :) to monitor whenever we are being mentioned to immediately reply and engage.
You seem to be doing so much stuff at Mention — Community and Customer Success are two huge roles! What is your typical day like? I think it would be helpful for people who wish to go into such roles :) — Alfred Lua
So yes, my day really starts with going into our app which picks up where we have been mentioned while I was away, then I try to engage with each mention and move on to scheduling social posts for the day. I usually keep about 18 tabs open throughout the day to keep checking on each tool :) Makes me really clumsy.
As you are responsible for Community and Customer success: How do you keep track of their success? Do you personally reach out to everyone and ask them how it’s going?
Correct me if I’m wrong. There are the numbers and the personal feeling of how a campaign goes. Are you purely deciding on the numbers if a campaign is successful or not? Do you take some precautions and reach out to the customer if you see some potential on improving the campaign somehow? — Daniel Baron
For the customer success side I reach out actively to some of the accounts I take care of and then reply to emails, support chat, and feedback such as NPS. The Net Promoter Score gives us an idea on how happy and successful people are, which the gives me an idea what user to work closer with.
What type of campaign do you have in mind. Social campaigns? 😅 I personally measure some metrics but if numbers are not tumbling down I just use my gut feeling. (Not very professional maybe)
Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter; Patricia, can you do us three smart example on how someone has used Mention in smart way you didn’t think about before ? Thanks. — Alessandro Avagliano
Really tough question 😅 With monitoring you can be very creative. I often get focused on our own methods and the ones you can find on our blog. But I will try to think of some examples and get back to that question :)
This is so interesting that we are talking about community and customer success as two distinct roles. I have been doing some research and experiments in this area and we are finding that a role such as Patricia’s is more like a bridge between the two. Would you agree Patricia? — damolade consulting
Would love to read some of your research on those two roles :) It is true, sometimes the two roles have a very thin line. Community is to me or at Mention a bridge between Marketing and Support.
How do you structure your time to respond in a timely manner but also take care of your other duties? — Jason Warner
Wish I had the right answer for how to well manage your time. I try my best. The newsletter is being sending out on Friday, therefore it only takes me some extra time that day. It’s a blog newsletter with our own blog content, some external content and a funny gif…choosing the right gif is what takes me the longest (priorities) :) Instead we use Helpscout for ticket support as well as our NPS replies are all being pushed into one tool, which is very helpful.
With 18 tabs to keep track of — how much of that Italian wine and cheese are you having during work hours to cope? Can you comment on what wine and cheese pair the best with multitasking? ;) — Jason Warner
We do have weekly beers at our Mention office but not before 6PM on Fridays :) I have a few favorite wines: Chianti Classico since I spend a year in Florence, any Banfi wines, Brunello of course. I am not sure about the pairing laws between those wines with cheeses but I am a huge pecorino fan, especially with white truffles inside. (can be bought at almost any Italian airport).
You have a sentiment analysis at mention. I guess the results are mainly measured by text and hashtags? Do you think this can become an issue since social media moves more and more to photo, video and live streaming? Do you already have a plan to address this with mention? How do you use channels like Instagram, Snapchat and periscope at medium? — Moritz Lampkemeyer
Great one! That is a question I never thought of. We have our own sentiment algorithm that our data scientist came up with (did not just come up with it, I guess). We scan all keywords within a message/tween/blog post to detect the overall sentiment. It is not and never will be 100% accurate, but it’s a good indicator to have. Not sure we have a plan B for when media will increasingly be video and images, but I will ask and get back to you. It’s a really interesting question.
How do you decide what content to create? — Jason Rajcok (@JasonDRajcok)
Hi Jason! I am not creating content…would honestly not have the time for it. It is also difficult as I self diagnosed myself with dyslexia ;)
Jumping in halfway — phew, hi everyone! Patricia, hello! Thanks for doing this AMA! I’d love to find out what your favorite ways for engaging with your community are and why :) — Stephanie Lee
Hi Stephanie! Thanks you :) Love the question. Favorite way to engage with our community is obviously jumping into conversations online and following up sending some goodies. We just very very recently started a Slack group to have a channel between users and our product team. It is another way to create a closer relationship with our community.
More basic questions:
What is/are your biggest challenge(s) there?
What gives you the most satisfaction at your job?
Have you had the dark hot chocolate at Angelina’s? — Jason Warner
Great basic questions :) Biggest challenges is time management, I easily get distracted speaking with a user or colleague. Biggest satisfactions is being in touch with people, the community and helping each other. And no 😔 I still did not have Angelina’s hot chocolate…I am not a chocolate fan. I understand, if some people would like to leave this chat since I said I don’t like chocolate.
How do you define an influencer and how do you find them? What are the important skills / kpi you are looking for? — Moritz Lampkemeyer
Influencers we find both using our influencer feature which provides a list with an influencer ranking. If you would like to try it out, you know who to ask :D But I also like to still look our myself for influencers, whenever someone mentions us on a Twitter chat, I reach out even if the person doesn’t have a huge follower base.
In percentages, how many individuals, agencies and enterprises are using your service? What’s the common user? — Daniel Baron
Most of our users are small to medium companies and agencies who monitor their clients. We are a French startup but more than 60% of our users are from the US, which I also find interesting.
Do you see a difference in US vs EU user base? Like more enterprises in US than in EU/France? — Daniel Baron
Yes, we definitely have more enterprise plans in the US than EU/France but our overall balance of enterprise plans is equal thanks to the Middle East :) US vs rest of the world
Plug a quick and fun question before we end! What are your favourite sub-reddits? :) — Alfred Lua
Favorite sub reddits :) I love so many, I don’t even know where to start. My most recent favorite is /r/me_irl. Usually I spend time on reddit to distract me from real life but the subreddit me in real life is still pretty entertaining.
So sorry that I have to end this amazing AMA now-ish! Feel free to stay around if you like!
Thank you so much, @patricia, for answering our questions and everyone for the questions! :smile:
Have a great weekend all! :)
I had sooo much fun being here and meeting everyone. Time flies when you have fun :) Thank you again everyone for coming and for the invite, Alfred!
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