Matthew
Staniec

T-Mobile’s multi-year partnership with Saturday Night Live brought exclusive behind-the-scenes content to fans across TikTok, YouTube, and X. The partnership also included a T-Mobile commercial featuring SNL talent and a sponsored on-air segment. My role was writing the social copy for each behind-the-scenes post for T-Mobile. I was able to combine the tone of both the T-Mobile and SNL brands into my copy that gave our audience a reason to watch, share, and come back week after week. The campaign earned a 2023 Clio Award in the Partnerships/Co-Creation Branded Content category.

Managed T-Mobile’s social community engagement across 6 consecutive Super Bowls (2021–2026), the highest-stakes, highest-volume event in social media marketing. Work spanned pre-game preparation, live real-time engagement during the broadcast, comment management on posts featuring T-Mobile Super Bowl commercials starring celebrities including Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, Bradley Cooper, Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Jason Momoa, and coordinating replies with both paid and organic creators.

Pre-game strategy included proactively seeking out pre-release commercials from competing brands and preparing potential reply strategies in advance with the goal of turning reactive moments into planned opportunities. In my first year leading Super Bowl community management, the results spoke for themselves: a 20x increase in engagement over the prior year, with individual replies outperforming the entire previous year’s community management engagement numbers.

When actor Chris Evans posted a farewell to his iPhone 6s, I saw the opportunity immediately. A single witty reply riffing on his role as Captain America became T-Mobile’s #1 most-engaged organic tweet of all time. No brief. No approval chain. Just sharp instincts, fast fingers, and a deep understanding of the brand’s voice.

Tasked with building T-Mobile’s presence on two emerging platforms, Threads and YouTube Community, entirely from scratch. No existing playbook, no audience, and no established best practices to follow.

On Threads, I developed a content strategy rooted in comedy and nostalgia (including fan-favorite posts around the iconic T-Mobile Sidekick) that grew the channel from 0 to over 100K followers in just over a year. On YouTube Community, I created a distinct approach tuned specifically to the platform’s audience, built around interactive polls and tech-forward content with a dash of humor.

After a rebranding, an outside agency was brought in to handle YouTube Community, but struggled to capture T-Mobile’s brand voice and tone. I was asked to take over the channel again, the third time I’ve owned it across my tenure, each time rebuilding engagement and re-establishing the authentic voice that makes the community work.

In September 2024, one comment started a viral movement.

A creator with a very small following posted a video suggesting T-Mobile should bring back the Sidekick phone. Most community managers would have scrolled past it. Instead, I replied by leaning into the nostalgia and hinting that T-Mobile was listening. That comment earned 80K+ engagements on its own and the audience went wild.

What followed was a content wave. Creators across TikTok started making their own videos about bringing the Sidekick back: what it should look like, what features it should have, why they needed it. I engaged across those posts throughout the month, accumulating hundreds of thousands of engagements in the process. The combined views across all creator content ran into the millions.

September 2024 became T-Mobile’s best engagement month of the entire year. All sparked by one comment on one small creator’s video. Not a single paid dollar went into it. No boosted posts, no influencer contracts, no media spend. Pure community management.

This case study is about more than two words and 118K likes. It’s about what separates a great community manager from an average one.

The band Lawrence had a clip going viral on TikTok, but not for the reason you’d think. The video itself wasn’t the story. The real action was happening in the comments, where a debate had broken out over whether the song sounded like it belonged in a commercial, specifically a tech commercial. If you watched the video and replied to the surface level content, you would have missed the entire opportunity.

By monitoring the conversation closely, I saw what was actually driving the virality and responded directly to the debate with two words: “should we?” It was short, sweet, and signaled to the audience that T-Mobile was genuinely tuned in to what the internet was talking about. The audience rewarded it with likes, replies, and promises to switch to T-Mobile because of it. That’s community management converting brand love into purchase intent.

Spotting a viral moment in the making. TikTok comedy creator @ThisGuyAbdullah had built a following by jokingly reinventing himself as a beauty influencer and publicly posted that one of his goals was to get sent to Coachella by a brand. We jumped into the comments, sparked a conversation, and made it happen.

T-Mobile sent Abdullah to Coachella as a direct result of that comment thread. The partnership called for 2 required posts, but he went above and beyond and delivered 7. My comments on his Coachella posts drove strong engagement throughout, extending T-Mobile’s reach across his audience organically.

Comedian Vinny Locasto posted a video talking about how his girlfriend thinks his voicemail greeting is “weird”. The greeting starts normally before launching into an epic rant aimed at telemarketers. He mentions having T-Mobile in the voicemail greeting, but he didn’t tag the brand in the post. I caught it through social listening, as fans were tagging T-Mobile in the comments. One deadpan comment later had the audience laughing and sharing the brand love.

Emily Zugay is a comedian with a degree in graphic design who went viral for redesigning brand logos. The redesigns are always intentionally terrible, deadpan, and hilarious. Brands across the internet were openly begging to be featured in her videos.

Instead of chasing her attention, I showed up in her comments naturally with a couple of genuine, playful replies that fit the vibe. Emily noticed, and on her own terms chose to feature T-Mobile in a video that earned 7.8 million views. She rebranded T-Mobile as “Tea Mobile: what’s the tea sis” and my reply leaning into the rebrand earned 40.3K likes and 57 replies.

Orchestrated a real-time brand exchange with Wendy’s during National Roast Day that captured widespread audience attention and earned media pickup across news outlets. By leaning into T-Mobile’s playful brand voice at exactly the right moment, the interaction became one of the most talked-about brand-on-brand exchanges of the campaign. It also led to fans sharing the interaction across all social media channels, with one fan’s TikTok video hitting 4.5M views.

When T-Mobile acquired Mint Mobile, I was asked to write the social copy that would frame it for T-Mobile’s audience across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The brief was minimal: match Ryan Reynolds’ tone, but keep it in T-Mobile’s brand voice. Two distinct voices that don’t automatically overlap.

The challenge was leaning into Reynolds’ signature wit and warmth without losing T-Mobile’s identity in the process. Each platform got copy tailored to its audience, such as TikTok got “Besties don’t shake hands, besties gotta hug @Mint Mobile” while Instagram got “Telling everyone that Ryan Reynolds is my co-worker now. Welcome to the fam @mintmobile.”

Designed and launched a Surprise & Delight customer engagement initiative from the ground up. The goal was to identify the right moments, build the framework, and execute personalized outreach to T-Mobile customers across social platforms. We built it to reward genuine community members, as well as non-customers, to generate authentic brand advocacy.

We got a huge response from the Surprise & Delights we did, even earning a 65% UGC rate among recipients. TikTok is where we saw our best response rate and most UGC.

Led the development of T-Mobile’s community engagement playbook by establishing response guidelines, tone frameworks, and training materials used across the community team. Codified what good engagement looks like at a brand serving 140M+ customers, ensuring consistency, protecting brand reputation, and scaling an approach that had previously relied on individual instinct.

While managing T-Mobile’s community, I was also asked to bring those same skills to Metro by T-Mobile, a separate brand with its own distinct voice, audience, and identity. For roughly a year, I managed real-time engagement and comment management across both brands simultaneously, switching between the different brand voices on the fly.

One of the most interesting challenges was social listening. Searching “Metro by T-Mobile” surfaces a flood of T-Mobile content and posts about metros and subways, making it genuinely difficult to surface relevant brand conversations. I developed a more refined approach to filtering and finding the right content to engage with, ensuring Metro’s community presence was consistent and authentic despite the noise.