Yeah, My name is Karen Young I am the EMEA MVP Regional Manager and I work for Microsoft.

MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional. Microsoft has this program and has had it for 14 years, we now have this programme as a global progamme across 90 countires, in 30 languages across 90 technologies. Its about community, ultimately what we do is have a number of people that use the community, whether that be online or offline so offline would be user groups for example and maybe speakers and authors and things like that. We also have online stuff which is the NewsGroups, the Forums the web masters and the bloggers. We recognise, we go out and find the top percentage and when we look at that top percentage of those people that answer great questions to people and share the technology, share the information to help people use the Microsoft products - thats what we do we reward those people and recognise them as MVP's.

Yes, naturally of couse its about Microsoft so it needs to be about Microsoft products, you do need to be highly technical, but theres a lot of highly technical people out there. What makes an MVP particularly special is the fact they share. They share within the community and that sharing experience evolves the end users experience with Microsoft and the products that they are using, so they get more functionality out of it and they start evolving with the product and really its about reaching peoples potential and MVP's help that.

There is about 180 now and that including Ireland

No, there is quite a richness about the MVP program, and you normally end up with people that are not just WebMasters, or not just Authors or not just people that go off and do speaking engagements. There tends to be a combination of things, we do look at combinations because it is important that its not just one person who does a lot of things on maybe one site and that's it. So, we tend to look at What's their reach, what's their credibility within the community. When people talk about, 'Who did you ask for that' those are the people that kind of like spring to mind naturally in the community

 [Laughs] What do i do?

So I manage a team...

No, the nice thing about the MVP program is that the people are independant, the MVP's are completely independant and the talk about real world scenarios, so they aren't in anyway cloaked with Microsoft stuff, they are passionate about this stuff anyway, so if they really love it they will talk about this stuff anyway, and if they are not too keen on certain things they are the people that will give us that kind of information, that's what Microsoft gets out of it, we get lots of feedback and not just from a product perspective to evolve the product but also maybe from a local office perspective about the way we are positioning something or whether we need to get our marketing slightly better or whether we need to look at user feedback from a local perspective, from language for example

What was your original Question? [Laughs]

What do I do? [Laughs] I went off and I tried to desperately.. desperately... I manage a team, I have got about 16 people, brilliant team a number of them are MVP leads, so if you like account managers, so they are the people that MVP's would go to locally if they have got issues...

Lorna, in the UK and Akim, if they have go issues or want to know something those are the people that do that. I have also a different part of the team which is regarding products that we are doing. So if we are going to do a localisation of a beta we would work with a couple of people and then get that beta out to the MVP's and maybe then the MVP's would share that information with the community, those are the kind of things what we have got.

KY: Yeah,

Yeah, it's 90 technologies and for me, one of the things that's really good is that the program will grow, but not incredibly large. What it's growing in particularly is some of the new technologies as community evolves, because community, a couple of years ago was only online or it's only one or two user groups now it's like youngsters are using communities, you've got 'You Tube', you've got 'My Spaces'. You've got people creating rock stars, Arctic Monkeys for example - out of nowhere that's how powerful the community is. From that perspective, you get the right messages out, you get MVP's talking about what's great about our product - that's amazing, it's amazing the effect that these people have on peoples impression and decisions about our product.

Well actually that's a really good questions because nominations and renewals is a very popular topic with the MVP's, because it is really a complete surprise to a lot of people that we have found them, looked at them and we've recognised them.

That's good... One of the things that I really love about this is hunting and finding these unique people, these exceptionally talented people and so what we do is we go out, we get, not just Microsoft employees, but the community themselves to recommend these people and then we start, monitoring them. Seeing their actions, seeing their answers, see what they are doing and then we write out a nomination form we then validate that in comparison to the rest of the other MVP's. So its the same kind of bar, and that gets through to a regional level and then through to the product group, so the product group ultimately has a big say in it and so does the local office. - so it's local and global at the same time.

[laughs]

I can't... [Laughs].. [Door opens] Hello

You are welcome, Thank you.