Monday, July 01, 2013

MVP Renewal

First of July might mean different things to different people. For MVP:s the first Award you get, sets you the phase (beginning of a quarter). As I got mine on the first of July 2012, my nerves we on high today.

When I received my first MVP Award, it arrived in my inbox at about 11 am CET. Hence I naturally was looking very keenly in my inbox at that time, and the following hours.

For those of you not very familiar with the process, if you are awarded, you are sent a letter, however, if you are not renewed, you will be sent nothing. No "you-will-not-be-an-MVP-any-more-email" or similar. You will just not get anything. On top of this, the MVP Award emails are notorious for getting stuck in spam filters, so you had better keep checking there too.

Hence, I was checking my inbox, and my spam-inbox, every 5 minutes, or every 3 minutes, or maybe it was every minute to see if I got any email. But nothing, I got some leads, some new customers, someone wanted to come worked at my Company, someone wanted to send me huge amounts of Money, who cared, no MVP letter.

The time reached 3 pm CET. They say that you can sometimes see the nerves on the outside of someones skin, well, that wasn't the case anymore, my nerves had crept out like Trichinella worms, made a nest in a nearby tree, fallen down, been eaten by a hungry panda and then shot by a crazy Russian on killing Spree. Close enough.

At about 4 CET, I managed to rewire my brain (like T2 in Terminator) and remembered that I could check the MVP website. Which I did and my surprise was palatable, this is what I saw:
 

Now most of you might have noticed the really stretched image of me or the fact that I look almost bold (which I am on the front part of my head). But what I noticed was the small "2" just below the Picture where it says "Awards since 2012". Hurray! I had been renewed! But why hadn't I received the email? Which was answered about 5 seconds later when the email arrived.

So if you are looking for a more exciting July 1:st, I would suggest contributing to the CRM Community and sending me an email describing why I should nominate you for an MVP, then you might very well have just as exiting July 1:sts as I, with Pandas, crazy Russians and Everything!

I am also very happy that Jukka Niiranen got awarded the MVP Award as I got the honor to nominate him. It is a a great honor for me to be able to nominate someone that gets awarded the MVP Award as that is a great confirmation of my judgement which is very gratifying. Jukka has been a great contributor to the Community and very well deserves the Award. The NDA that you are required to sign as an MVP due to the fact that you get to see a lot of classified information, put us under a lot of restriction on what kind of news we are allowed to blog about. Jukka has been very good at drawing out the bleeding edge info from hazy photos from Convergence, eXtremeCRM and similar and I hope he will be able to continue this without too much hindrance from the very strict NDA.

Do read his blog about his MVP Award if you have not done so already!
http://niiranen.eu/crm/2013/07/mvp-award-why-communities-rock/

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se