Erik Jorgensen, MSN corporate vice president. (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ)

Microsoft’s Erik Jorgensen is corporate vice president for MSN, overseeing one of the largest online portals at a time when Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are competing aggressively for the time and attention of internet users. Jorgensen, also MSN’s chief media and technology officer, discussed the company’s current strategy for MSN — and plans for its future — in a recent interview.

On MSN’s partnerships, such as its arrangement with BermanBraun Interactive on the “Wonderwall” celebrity site: One of the things we’ve learned is that having a different user interface for different topics, different content, is important. It can’t just be one. There’s certainly a role for templates and for getting more standardized as people traverse different categories, but you have to understand which categories fit with which templates... Partnerships work for us. We’re not going to be the creative minds behind all great media. In each market, we’ve got to reach out and have the kind of strong partnerships that allow us to create the kind of content experience that Wonderwall is.

On the role of user-generated content on MSN: We’ve got something called Superfans. We like the idea of figuring out how we create a platform that lets people contribute valuable content on a topic they know, and integrate it into the content experience. That applies to video; it applies to articles. In this case, with Superfans, people who are really big into a certain show or a celebrity can create these sites and manage them, but the rest of the community can contribute to it.

How MSN is experimenting with social networking content, starting with a pilot project in Brazil: What we’ve done (in the Brazil pilot) is, anytime you come across a form of content or a video or an image that you like … with a simple drag you can share it with somebody — it brings it up in an IM window so you can have a conversation about it, you can email it, you can post it to Facebook, anything you want. It also brings in activity feeds from different social networks... What you’ll see in the fall from us is social content as a relevant form of content that people want on their home-page experience.

How MSN uses data to improve the overall user experience: With half a billion users, you can get the wisdom of crowds coming through on content. We don’t create a lot of content, but we add value on top of the content. One of the ways to do that is with social metadata — comments, ratings, reviews, all the things that add value to the content and help us make it more relevant. By understanding that on a segmented basis of the crowds, we can begin to let user and social input drive the relevance.

On MSN’s integration of Microsoft’s Bing search engine: Pre-Bing we were seeing that about 60 percent of our users were regular Google and Yahoo searchers. So we’ve got a leakage problem where people aren’t able to stay and get one great experience from a single spot.

Are you seeing any sign that that has changed with the Bing launch? Too early. I haven’t seen any data yet that would suggest one way or the other... The way we do our content programming today takes the user on a journey where it often can end up in search. The approach we’re taking with Bing — having more structured content, the “decision engine” concept of having a richer search experience — makes it an even stronger connection. It extends the value that the portal can have, and also strengthens the connection between search and the portal.

On Microsoft’s three online brands: MSN, Windows Live and Bing: Having been around this for a long time, I certainly feel better now than I have at any other point about the clarity of what each of those three is. It passes the distant relative test — I can go and talk to somebody who is not technically savvy and pretty succinctly describe what each of those three stands for now. (MSN is online content), Windows Live is communication and social networking, and Bing is search. Earlier as we looked at some of those things, that was not as clear. The thing that we need to solve, frankly, is how to make that design and user experience more seamless across those. When we talk to users, they get the value now in each of those three — it’s really about when you traverse between them, how does that feel consistent and seamless.