Sevenload relaunches and lets us peek in the coders’ room

Hardcore IT people know that migrating a web community with tens of thousands of users to a new technical platform is no fun. It’s very hard work that requires extremely careful planning and meticulous process control to work out as planned. Meaning that the user experience should not be impacted more than absolutely necessary.

This is exactly what German video/multimedia sharing community sevenload is trying to accomplish this weekend. Twenty months after its foundation the company based in Köln is getting ready to unleash platform version 3.0 which is meant to provide the technical basis for future expansion as founder Ibrahim “Ibo” Evsan explains in an interview at (German) media news service DWDL.de.

In such a transition situation a Web company has two fundamental options.

1. Turn the big switch from one minute to the next and see what happens. Even most diligent testing will never prevent something bad to happen and features (or the entire platform) to malfunction. Huge numbers of user complaints would be the result and the helpdesk would have a hard time appeasing people. Not to mention the negative buzz in blogs and forums. Microsoft does the equivalent with every new version of Windows. We know what happens then.
2. Open the virtual doors to users and let them participate in what happens during such a major technical overhaul phase. As most of us aren’t hardcore IT folks, we can’t really imagine what’s behind “rewriting the entire software and migrating the platform to the next generation of hardware and app servers”. So why not explain as you go?!

So option 2 is what sevenload went for. And as far as I can tell at this point it’s working out nicely from a PR and community relations perspective. Here’s what’s happening since Friday night (the team is 50 hours + into the migration process now):

First sevenload put their site into “read only mode”, meaning that users can only view existing content such as videos, photos, audio, podcasts, entertainment channels, etc. That’s limiting the user experience, yes, but the communications team explains why this needs to happen in the company blog. The corporate blog is the pivotal point for everthing “official” that the user base needs to know and comms manager Mike Schnoor makes sure to post status updates on a regular basis.

Now that the developer team is working night and day to deploy the new platform, it’s a good time to build some anticipation for the new things to come, so posting screenshots of the new website design and UI details is a great idea. Asking for comment helps involve the users and this openness has brought sevenload a good bunch of positive comments, buzzing with anticipation.

Meanwhile, founder Ibrahim Evsan gives some impressions of how the team is doing and how everyone is working hard to make the transition phase as short a possible. His personal blog is the stage for this peek behind the scenes, complete with photos and short video bits (hosted on YouTube for the time being). It makes the process a lot more transparent and shows that it’s humans after all who make the transformation happen, with very human needs such as sleep. In fact key developers were sent to bed by their boss, he tells us, to reload some energy before taking the last turn before the finish line. Ibo uses Twitter to let his 340 follower know what’s happening, too, linking to his latest blog posts. That helped spread the buzz in the German blogosphere beyond editorial media sites like DWDL and Turi2 into blogs like Cem Basman’s and this one.

But what if things don’t go as planned? In fact, the original plan was to go live with the new site on Saturday night. Come Sunday morning, some users started getting impatient in their blog comments. Once again, time to explain on the blog what exactly is happening and why things are much more complicated than just turning a switch somewhere in the server room. Commentators still appreciate that and encourage the sevenload team to hang in until things are all set up. Meanwhile Ibo gives some insight into the new features.

All in all this is a great example of how PR and community relations can and should work these days. Openness and transparency is not just lip service here but actually lived and breathed with every tweet and post. Fingers crossed Ibo, Mike and team that everything goes to plan!

By the way, the business implications of this relaunch are very interesting, too. Ibo mentions in his DWDL interview that sevenload will be able to embed YouTube content and even make it searchable if the user whishes to. Why would an video service do that, embed an obvious competitor’s content? Now that’s something for another post. Maybe later today.