Matthew
Staniec

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.

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.

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.