 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking to you with Teresa. Hello. Hey, Christian. How are you? I'm doing well. And for folks that don't know you, brand new MVP, tell us who you are, where you are and what you do. All right. My name is Teresa Cyrus and I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The MVP is in apps and services. I develop a lot of training content for Microsoft services. So the office applications were PowerPoint teams and the new outlook is what I'm really focusing on. So I offer training to private and group individuals. So that's what I do. Well, something that I like, it's kind of a, not so strong of a brag, but so Sharon Weaver and I run this monthly cohort of people that are interested in finding out more about the MVP and RD programs and we mentor them through that process. And Teresa joined her very first cohort call and that same day received her MVP. Exactly. I remember asking the question. I remember saying, I don't know if my videos are going to be enough to get this award and while we were on the call, I must was getting the emails and then I joined the women's teams call and got the email. So that was, that was pretty interesting that I was on that call and received it that day. Well, here's a, see, see the power of just being associated with that cohort, being involved for anybody that's interested, reach out to me. We're that good. Exactly. You answered all my, all my questions. So that was good. Yeah. So what, what is the, the answer to that question? Like now that you're going to be asked and I'm sure you've already heard as a brand new MVP, some people in your network that have reached out like, how'd you do it? What was the process of becoming that? So what is the answer to what's the right volume of, of community contributions? I would say just do what you love doing. Just keep, you know, for me, I push up videos like twice a week. And it was interesting. I wasn't, my original strategy was not focused around YouTube. YouTube was just the holding place for my videos. And then January, when I made that switch and say, I need to focus on YouTube, right? But I just continue to go out on tech community. I really enjoy helping end users with their issues. And again, thinking of knowing that Microsoft is going towards this new outlook, getting people ready. Hopefully they, you know, do that user adoption and start, you know, using it early. That was what I did. I just want to just continue to help end users simplify their workday every day. You know, that's, that's my, like my tagline, simplify your workday every day. So it's just really just continue to just do what you love. It's your passion. And that's what I like doing. It's helping, helping people. I know people don't like that answer that it's, it really is a black box to all of us. Like how Microsoft selects the MVPs. It's a, and that's why I completely agree. You just need to do what you do. I do the things that I do, regardless of the MVP title, it's just part of my persona. It's, it's my passion. It's my hobby is content generation, you know, writing about sharing what I'm learning and my journey and my experience. That's what you have to do. Yeah. And I look at it, like, I didn't come into this saying I want to be MVP. That was never, that was not part of my goal. It wasn't that it was just starting to push information out. And then, then, you know, I met Dan and he start mentioning the MVP. The other thing is that I didn't realize, you know, I was so focused on the end users, you know, as my audience that I forgot about it folks as well, right? You have to have that balance of it and I make sure on my LinkedIn because I'm really heavy on LinkedIn is I don't want to be to it heavy with followers and I don't want to be to admin assistance and business users, right? I want that balance between the both because, you know, as IT professionals, we are so end users as well. Yep. And I do, I want to again, a shout out to Dan Ray, who does a tremendous amount for as an MVP for the community, helping mentor and helping identify new MVP. So I'd say that if you're, if you're one, you're part of our monthly cohort, and you know, Dan Ray, then like you're almost a shoe in. Yeah. Yeah. He, once I got up under his wing, what he didn't realize is that I was going to follow the way he posts, you know, learning from him, way he posts information out on LinkedIn, you know, way he, he has one is as a people developer, right? And just here recently, I'm starting to have a lot of people reaching out to me. So I can see me, some of the things that I'm learning from him that I will be passing off to others because just within, you know, since the first of the month, I have quite a bit of people who have reached out to me, you know, asking those type questions. And the main thing is when we were at CLAPCOM, the whole idea was to have a perspective from an MVP perspective and an expiring MVP, you know, perspective, and, you know, just wanted to make sure just continue to do what you love to do. Don't chase it. Yeah. Don't chase it. And I think the other thing is, too, is make sure that it's not like something you just, you know, in six months, oh, in six months, I want to do this. Yeah. You know, you got to think about your contribution, contribution for a year. And for me, I've been doing this for two and a half years. Yeah. That was about, so for me, the same time, I, I left Microsoft in mid 2009 and earned mine in January 2012. So it was about two and a half years. Right? Yeah. About two and a half years. I could do math. I can, we can do hard things. And, but it was, but it's the same thing. It's what I, what I talk about, and you've heard me talk about it in that the cohort call as well, is, you know, it's, it's about developing those healthy habits, you'll find things that you like, that you enjoy. And it could be a combination of creating YouTube videos, video shorts, blogging, I do a lot of blogging. I love organizing AMAs. So a lot of what I like doing is not even me answering the, the technical questions, but gathering the people, answering the, you know, identifying the questions, answering those questions, and then doing the post production, putting together the video and the blog post around that. And so I, I look at a lot of what I do, even this series in my podcast, I'm highlighting the work of others. It's not even things that I'm necessarily, I'm out there doing at the forefront. I, I prefer raising up others and showcasing their great work and talking to them about that. That's what, that's what my passion is about. And one of the things is with my videos, I'm starting to have people to reach out to me and say, Hey, I, I like your style of delivery. You know, can you give me some pointers, right? You know, what equipment do you use? Cause I remember, you know, that I was them two years ago. I knew nothing, you know, about production setup, right? The lighting, the audio, you know, all that's in place. If you go back and look some of my earlier videos, they were terrible, but I stayed at it, right? And so, you know, having people to reach out and asking those questions and sharing that information. So hopefully that their experience is a little bit easier than mine. I think the, the one that used to get me is that I have a great video. I'm not going to say it was perfect, a great video. And to find it, the audio was not one. Yeah. Well, there, you know, it's, it's funny. When I started, I was just telling somebody about this like last week. So I started, I did a series of videos that are all still out on YouTube. They actually did about 200 of them. And I think it's that series, not I think, I know it was that series that pushed me over the edge and got me into the MVP program. But I went around and some viewers might remember this. I did a series called The One Thing. And as I was traveling and speaking at conferences around the world, and I was blessed to work for a company, I was the chief evangelist. And so they paid for me to go to these events. I still had to submit and get accepted to speak. But I was speaking at these events around the world. You know, I've keynoted on five continents. I mean, it's just I've had a lot of experience doing that. And I would capture these little short videos where just for could be a minute long, could be four minutes long where I would ask people, hey, what's the one thing people need to know about back then it was SharePoint 2010? And I would just record their their answers. And then I would go back and I would do the post production around that. Now, that was on like a little Kodak flip camera thing, this tiny little device. And so it was, you know, really not great quality video. But I realized that if I got away from the noise, because it would pick up all the ambient noise, if we got to a quiet place and that I took the time to adjust the lighting to make sure we're in a good natural light spot. I was to find that and capture these. And some of those people are like, ah, that's great quality. I'm like, I just lucked out. It was because I was aware of lighting and sound. Well, for me is, like I said, YouTube, I remember telling my my friends saying, I don't want to be a YouTuber. That was my line two and a half years ago in January of this year. I said, I was my YouTube channel was flat lines, right? I only have like 72 followers, you know, after, you know, two years or so or a year and a half. And I said, I got a switch. I got to change. And once I start changing my thumbnails, start thinking about the content, start thinking about the lighting, everything. I have eight hundred and thirty one followers just within that nine, ten months that I made the change the first January. I changed all of my thumbnails. You know, I start to think about the SEO. So when I start to make that change, I saw a difference. And, you know, the followership in in my in my with my YouTube channel. So that was really interesting that you do have to pay attention to that. And it made a huge difference. I think the other thing that I do differently or did slightly differently and I'll use the wiki page retirement as an example. A lot of people was pushing information out, saying it's being retired and gave you the details. And then they left it alone. I stayed with the end users, right? I kept giving them updates and answering their questions. So I found that if I found an issue that the end users were having and answering that, that's what did great. Yeah, because I was always thinking, I want to be proactive. I want them to be proactive to learn this new feature. No, it's really addressing, you know, the issues that they're having. Those are the videos that did well. You know, that that left navigation been moved from, you know, the bottom to the left is my top video. No, you know, there's something to be said about. I mean, this is as a marketing guy, you know, finding that that issue and becoming the subject matter expert on that issue. A lot of people think is like, is there really that kind of opportunity? It's like, are you kidding me now? Especially that you have this rapid expansion, the universe is expanding in the Microsoft world because, you know, every time Microsoft creates a new feature for something, they're slapping a logo on it now. And it's this new, you know, skew this new sub offering of as part of like just look at Viva as an example, what's happening across, you know, Entra and security at any of these areas. Like I was interviewing an MVP who's talked about wanting to become one of the top experts in Microsoft syntax. And I'm like, there's a massive opportunity for more content around that and experiences and be the voice of that. Go and do it. Good friend of mine, Hans Brender, who became, you know, he tagged himself, Mr. OneDrive. And but it's stuck. And now he's one of the people like they have questions about OneDrive and they will reach out to Hans for help with that. So so when I started this, because my background was SharePoint, right? And when I started this, my husband just knew I was going to go down that path and I said, no, I know that 2016 and 2019 is going to be retired in 2025. And when Microsoft started making that shift from, you know, the classic outlook who, you know, I'm one of those folks who's been using the classic outlook, you know, desktop version forever, you know, ever since they wrote it out when they make that change. People are going to struggle with that change. And I said, I'm going to be ready for them. I am going to be ready when Microsoft is ready to start to, you know, because this was two years ago. I didn't know what this new outlook was going to look like. I didn't know when they were going to start pushing it. But I wanted to be ready for that. So when they start to push these features out, end users have a place to go. And it's perfect timing because now I'm over my learning curve with all my equipment and lighting and all of that. So it's perfect timing that I'm in the place that I'm in. Now that Microsoft is ready to, you know, slowly, gradually, you know, push these features out, right? And and and that was my mindset, because my my husband thought that I was really going to go back down the road for SharePoint, because this is what I do all day. I don't I don't have a daytime job. This is my daytime job, right? Well, look, I so I started as a SharePoint MVP. That was that's my world as well. It's funny. I was in the IBM world and I've shared this a lot. People have heard me say this, but, you know, my back in 2005, I had so I officially saw SharePoint. I visited Microsoft campus. I was invited up by people in the product team in 2004. They showed me what they were working on, which was the early stages of what would become the 2007 version. And I told them that their product was garbage. OK, a year later. That was in 2005. Well, I worked with other collaboration technology that was much more expensive, like million dollar entry point kind of software, but was beautiful product. And what we were using back in 2001, 2002 was on par with what is SharePoint 2010. You know, so it was much far advanced, but very expensive. But anyway, that's where I started off with SharePoint 2010. Which is a great platform. Our company had wrote the company I worked for had wrote it out. And we knew nothing about SharePoint. And so they had their senior analysts, you know, migrating, you know, to SharePoint 2010. And I went to them and said, let me let me train them. We don't know what we're doing, you know. And they would say things like, oh, it's just like outlook. No, it's not. You know, it's not just like outlook and PowerPoint, you know. And I said, let me train them, let the senior analysts migrate them and I'll come behind them and train, you know, the basic contributor users. And then I created a training program for the site owners and then power users. So that's how I started off in SharePoint. And I was learning it and teaching it as I go. Yeah, that's a great way to do that. But it's so what I what I realized was like I I worked in so in the IBM world prior to the Microsoft Community Court, I've used always been a Microsoft stack guy did graphic design on Apple devices, but was really a PC guy since the early nineties. But having worked in the I worked with rational software out of you familiar with rational, they got acquired by IBM. But what was fantastic was a really rich, dynamic community around that IBM bought that it killed the community. And so one of the things I recognized in 2005. So it's funny, I had a client that was just like, you got to take a look at this SharePoint and that it was the community side of it. And this that was already growing and already vibrant. And I just I recognized how similar that was to what I experienced with rational software. And so that kind of convinced me to take a look and, you know, got help in a number of different areas very quickly, early on, some MVPs got involved. And so that's something that, you know, Microsoft has already been known for its partner community. But you hear executive say this, Jeff Teeper says it all the time, like we have the best community in tech. And it really is that it's why there's so much opportunity. That's why we're helping each other to learn. And you've got to going back to where you started. It's not maybe not quite mirroring other experts that are out there. But but take a look at those that have been successful. What are they doing? How do they do those things and build those into your healthy habits? I want to I want to go back to when you were saying about talking about SharePoint. The other reason why I didn't go down the road to SharePoint, knowing that I knew this was going to be my day job, you actually have to be working with end users and and experience the the issues that they're having. Yeah. And, you know, not having that daily interaction with clients and helping them with real life issues and them dreaming up, hey, I want to do this. Can I how can I get this done? And I knew that I wouldn't be able to service that community, you know, at a 10 rating because not having that interaction with them every day. Like I said, they would dream up wanting to do, you know, can I do this? And that's where that creativity come from and making the not making the system, but getting the system to work with you to produce what they want. I mean, that was the exciting part for me around SharePoint. Well, that's why you have a majority of MVPs. Yeah, that's why the majority of MVPs are in consulting roles, whether they work for a consulted company or and there are a number of MVPs that work for, you know, a product company and or just or an industry as in industry, you know, you work for a bank, you there's work, work for an airline or whatever, and you're using the technology your day to day. But you're you're right. It's you lose something when you're not on that front line with users. That's right. You're exactly right. And that is another reason why I went to tech community and start answering questions because it kept me connected to what the users were having issues with. And like I said, a couple of my videos that it's doing very well is because the information, the question that I received on tech community or Reddit, I go there and users have an issue and I'll address it or do a creative video for it. That's where, you know, that's the major impact. That's the positive impact there when you actually helping them with an issue. Yep. No, that is that is one of the best. It's I always joke. And that's what we like to do as IT professionals, right? Of course. But there's something you have to be careful about. Like certainly I've had, you know, videos that get thousands of views and have taken off, I've done things for clients that have been, you know, tens of thousands of views. I mean, I had a I've got a presentation that I used to give. I did for years, I did variations of it. I had over half a million views on one presentation. Still out there on SlideShare somewhere. But that's not what it's about. I mean, sometimes it's I'll have a video that will be live for two weeks. And there's like 30 views of that video. But then someone will reach out to me and be like that solved the exact issue. It's, you know, and that is so much more satisfying than seeing, you know, a high number of views with no interactions. It's that that engagement with the individuals. Positive or negative comments, right? Because I know that with the new outlook video that when it first was rolled out, there was a lot of missing features. And I had to I had to actually say to them, I'm a user just like you. Don't don't don't shoot the messenger. But, you know, but the fact that they were sharing their information and what I liked about with the new outlook, the missing features that they had shared with me, I start to compel a list. So now I keep track of the missing features. So when it is roll out or there is a workaround, I share that. Well, if you're wondering about like ideas to go and write about, that that's exactly the place to start. What questions are people asking about? If you're passionate about a product or a service, like, what are the questions that people have that are out there? Like, if you go in and do a search on and I wish, you know, Bing search was as effective as Google search, we won't get into that discussion. Like, but but I'll go in and do that. Well, I'll I'll ask a question out on Google and it'll show me related searches or questions that are being asked in that topic. And, you know, it's interesting to to to look at that. What are the other questions that are out there? Then then search on those sub questions and see what has somebody answered this? You know, and so it's a great way to as your creating content to make sure. Am I robustly answering this question with the other questions? Because not everybody may ask the question the same way, so they may not find your response. And so by building that, it's almost having an SEO mindset and optimize your content for searchability. And again, I do it. I get these questions from tech community and from Reddit, right? So I know that there was a couple of questions around something dealing with PowerPoint. And I was like, if they're having this question and starting to see the number of people that view that on tech community, then I give them the response. The other thing that I do differently, too, is I always give them, you know, screenshots, a lot of times on tech community, they're just typing the answer. And I give them screenshots because I'm always thinking of the end user and their, you know, their computer skills, right? If they they may not know. And so I always put screenshots with it as well. But tech community and Reddit is where I get a lot of, you know, real life questions and issues and I develop content around that. Well, we'll have to I'll have to include your profile link to both of those locations that I sometimes do when when MVPs at an interview are involved in tech tech community and I'll put their tech community profile. But it's kind of my final question I always wrap on. But Teresa, for folks that want to reach out to you or connect with you, where are you most active in social besides tech community? And it's like, where can people find you? LinkedIn, YouTube and tech community. So those are the three that I'm really, you know, visible on. And you see in my name track creation for E. So that's the number for E. Track creation is where we explore, experiment and execute effectively. So that's my tagline. Excellent. Well, Teresa, really appreciate your time. Great to talk to you again. Thank you. Thank you for having me.