Social Media Conversion On The Enterprise Level - From Static To Interactive

June 26, 2007

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by israelrothman

Whew! Last weekend we went live with Real Estate Magazine’s new enterprise level conversion from a static magazine site with over 20,000 pages to a full blown interactive social media platform, with user generated (well not yet) and user-filtered interaction.

What an undertaking! Between the apprehension of their huge team of entrenched employees with their own individual resistance to any change at all, to the sheer volume of over 50 pages and over 20,000 articles, it was a huge job!

It is a good thing we did it on the weekend, as the new version of the site (upgraded in preparation for going live) would not support the enhancements, and we had many bugs to work out within the integrated shopping cart, mailing and email list management, interactive forums and other scripting which had to be configured live.

If I had not been such an old stubborn bulldog, apprehensive employees would have put the brakes on right when the two gigantic, daily-updated databases and huge mailing lists were almost exactly in sync!

As it was, the transition was a grueling 72 hour marathon of trouble shooting, scraping, and customer service for our staff.

Although it was not without hiccups, I do not believe we could have gone slower without slowing to a crawl and doubling the cost, human and other; nor faster without serious problems. They have an opt-in email list of over 300,000 to maintain, a print circulation mailing list of nearly 40,000, and now opt-in RSS feeds for over 20 separate categories! These had to be merged into one, and they all had different fields and source formats (the old database had over 300 tables)!

Thank goodness we are able to work for two weeks without time off, or we could not have done it!

Nevertheless, it is live, getting three times the hits already (due to way better SEO), and worth it for any website. Be the first to fill out a profile, and benefit from the link to the forums on every one of over 20,000 indexed pages!

http://www.rismedia.com/forums/