The Digital Analyst

Hire movers. They're worth every penny.

In  the middle of February I received an offer to work for Altimeter Group in San Francisco, CA.  This was an excellent opportunity to take the next step in my career and work with a very talented, intelligent group of social media experts.  The only thing that kept my excitement in check was the prospect of relocating to a city I had never visited before.  The first time I ever set foot in San Francisco was actually for the last round of interviews, so moving somewhere so unfamiliar was daunting to say the least.

I had already made a major relocation once before when I moved cross-country from Chicago to Los Angeles three years ago, but that move wasn’t as intimidating because I had a very solid base of friends who moved to LA after graduation.  Three of my four best friends lived there along with a large number of friends I had from the theater department at Northwestern University who were trying to succeed in the entertainment industry.  It was stressful, but having a network of friends there made the transition much easier.

I knew three people in San Francisco before I moved here and one of them was studying in Japan for a semester.  That coupled with the fact that I had never set foot in the city meant I needed to get creative and use every single tool at my disposal to make it work.  The following is a list of the most important tools, websites and apps that helped me make this transition as smooth as possible.

Leverage Your Networks

This might seem obvious, but it was an important first step for me so I had to include it.  Hopefully you know someone in the city you’re relocating to, and if not, then hopefully the rest of the tools I list will help you.  The biggest question mark for me when moving to San Francisco was where to live.  Every neighborhood has it’s own character, traditions and style, but I only had two weeks to find an apartment and move in, so the first thing I did was reach out to the three people I knew there to ask them which neighborhoods I should look at in my apartment search.  This helped immensely.  Even if you don’t know someone in the city you’re moving to, you probably know someone who grew up there or lived there at one point.  One tool you can use to help this is searching your friends list on Facebook by hometown and current town.

Craigslist

All I can say is thank God for Craigslist.  I can’t imagine apartment hunting without it.  I was also lucky that the San Francisco Craigslist pages allowed you to narrow your search for apartments by neighborhoods.  This feature is available in New York City, but not Chicago or LA.  You can always work around it by searching for the neighborhood’s name, but it can be tough when neighborhoods have nicknames or if the posts only mention a street.

UPDATE (2/17/12): @JulesFaas made a great suggestion in the comments to use PadMapper.  Couldn’t agree more with her.  One of the more frustrating things when comparing Craigslist apartments is that you can’t compare locations on a map.  For those like me who are more spatially and visually inclined, this website really helps augment the Craigslist experience.

WalkScore

One of the best new websites I discovered in this process was WalkScore, which rates neighborhoods on a hundred point scale based on how walkable they are.  Scores under 50 mean you’ll be dependent on a car and anything above a 90 is a “Walker’s Paradise” where your daily errands don’t require a car.  It was really important to me that I lived somewhere very walkable, so this was incredibly helpful.  It also provides you with lists of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, grocery stores, parks, and other lists of places nearby that can give you a better idea of what’s in the neighborhood.  My current apartment’s score is a 97 and I’m thinking about getting rid of my car now.  My old apartment in Venice was an 78, which is “Very Walkable”, but the difference between the neighborhoods has definitely made my move much easier.  I LOVE how convenient my new neighborhood is and the scores pretty accurately reflects that convenience.  Even if you aren’t apartment hunting, it’s interesting to see how your neighborhood scores.

Google Street View

Craigslist and WalkScore gave me a bird’s eye view of possible apartments and what their neighborhoods has to offer, but Google Street View rounded out the experience by giving my the ability to virtually walk down the street.  Almost all apartments on Craigslist include a link to Google Maps and from there you can zoom in far enough and actually move around the neighborhood as if you were just out for a walk.  It’s a great tool for getting a feel for what the neighborhood looks like without ever stepping foot in the city.  This was especially helpful in my search considering how little experience I had with San Francisco before moving here.

Evernote

The second weekend after I got my offer I drove up to San Francisco to check out apartments.  I had been looking at Craigslist nearly every day for potential apartments, but decided the best way to save my favorite ones for follow up was syncing them with my favorite note-taking application, Evernote.  Using the Chrome plug-in, I clipped full page craigslist ads to my account, which synced with the app I had installed on my iPhone.  That way I had access to the pictures, links, phone numbers and addresses in each post on my phone without having to re-search Craigslist.  It’s true you could create a folder of bookmarks and then sync it to your phone’s web browser, but Evernote allows you to write your own notes above the webpage that’s been clipped.  So after I’d check out an apartment I’d give it a rating and type in any important things like “Windows look out onto an ugly brick wall.  Feels like a prison.” or “Landlord is really friendly and street parking nearby is pretty easy”.  If you aren’t using Evernote yet, I’d strongly recommend checking it out.  It’s simply the best note-taking application I’ve used yet.

Apartment Application + Credit Report

One of the most annoying parts of any apartment search is filling out multiple applications that ask for the same details.  Knowing that I was going to check out at least 10 apartments and that I might want to apply for up to five or more of them, I decided I’d create my own application.  I google searched “apartment application” and found this document.  Applications can vary between management companies though, so I just used it as a guideline and created word documents for each section.   Looking at a couple applications will let you know what to include in the document, but mine included previous addresses (including the dates I lived there, management company contact information and monthly rent), my employment history, professional contacts and personal references.  I also included a credit report so I could avoid some of the application fees, but most management companies will require you to submit to a background/credit check anyway.  Only two management companies accepted my credit report, but it only cost me $15 and ended up saving me about $40.  Put all these documents into an envelope that you can hand to the landlord when he’s showing you the apartment and you come off as very prepared and responsible.  Plus, it’s great to just have all that information saved in a document that you can update and use in the future.

Meetups

One of the most intimidating aspects of moving to San Francisco was the fact that I’d have to rebuild my social life from the ground up.  I’ve made a very concerted effort to get out of the apartment and explore the city, but exploring isn’t enough.  I generally find it pretty easy to make friends, but it’s tough when you don’t have other friends to introduce you to their social circles.  Meetup.com is a website where you can signup for “meetups” which are basically groups that schedule events open to the public.  Think high school clubs for adults.  There’s a meetup for nearly any interest you could have: meditation, yoga, photography, writing, professional networking, sports team fans, religion, live music…. and if the meetup you’re looking for doesn’t exist, go ahead and create it!  It’s a great way to meet people with common interests and everyone who joins is usually very friendly because the whole point of it is to make new friends.  Just be careful about your email communication settings.  Joining a bunch of meetups can quickly flood your inbox, which can discourage you from seeing the value in the service and using it.

FlavorTownUSA.com

One of my favorite TV shows is Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on The Food Network.  The food always looks incredible and the restaurants have a ton of character.  ”Flavortown, USA” is one of the catch phrases from the host, Guy Fieri, as in “Wow, partner, that meatloaf sandwich is a trip to Flavortown, USA.”  He has a ton of great catch phrases like that, but someone turned this one into a website that maps out all of the restaurants he’s featured in the show on a searchable google map.  Each restaurant has it’s own page with details and most include the actual video clip from the show so you can see their signature dishes and what it’s like inside before you visit.  This website is now one of the first places I go anytime I have a road trip planned and I’ve never been disappointed.  In a new city, it can help you explore new neighborhoods and many locals usually know about the places, so it can often be a nice conversation starter.

SF WAY

This is a San Francisco-specific tool I’ve been able to use, but it’s been one of the most useful iPhone apps I’ve ever downloaded.  It contains over 50 different apps, including tools to locate Wifi hotspots, tours, restaurants, bars, nightlife and guides to help you navigate public transportation, find local events and read local news among many other things.  It’s a jack-of-all-trades app for living in San Francisco that would be helpful to anyone in the area, not just those of us who are new.  If you aren’t moving to San Francisco, just try searching your phone’s App Store for your city’s name and see what comes up.  You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find.

What did I miss?

Those were the most helpful tools I used during my relocation to San Francisco and I’ve been very pleased with just how smooth a transition it has been.  I’ll keep adding websites, apps and other tools as I find them, but I’m curious to hear what other people have used.  Do you have any suggestions for people moving to San Francisco or relocating in general?  Please leave any feedback you have in the comments section below!

The reason I love Jackson Pollock, and especially this piece called Convergence, is because I believe his paintings reflect the complexity and beauty of human expression.

Facebook and Twitter are challenging the very foundation of our internet experience.  From the days of dial-up, the Internet has been the most prolific catalog of human experience in recorded history.  Services like Google and Yahoo have made millions of dollars organizing all of that data for us to search, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace, coupled with the emergence of real-time information provided by Twitter have irreversibly altered the landscape of the Internet.

Many consider email the advent of the social web and modern email clients like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are more easily compared to social networks, but at its heart, email is just a messaging service.  It might deliver messages in the blink of an eye instead of taking days or weeks, but in the end it’s just a digital form of mail.  Chat rooms are another form of early social communication, but real identities were very rarely ever linked to this communication and nascent chat rooms more or less resembled the wild west of creepsters and registered sex offenders.

The true advent of widely accepted social interaction on the web are instant messenger services where you communicated with people you knew and who knew you in real-time chat windows.  It was the beginning of real conversations on the web.  Instant messaging served as proof of concept that people desired to use the internet as a social medium.

Direct instant messaging services like AIM were essentially the real-time expression of an email correspondence.  You can think of Twitter in the same frame of real-time expression of an already established form of social media communication, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

MySpace and eventually Facebook upped the anty when they allowed users to create profiles that they could customize to reflect their individuality and connect to other profiles that reflected their real life group of friends and family.  If instant messaging gave us a voice to communicate digitally, then social networks gave us a presence on the Internet that reflected our personality in the real world.

I’d also argue that MySpace’s fall from grace could be partly blamed to the nature of user-expression in their profiles.  Many people immediately reference the customizable profile elements as a primary draw for creating a MySpace profile, but after a while the aesthetic of the MySpace community became very confused and to be frank, ugly.  Not to discount the importance of individuality, but connections are usually formed because of commonalities and feelings of familiarity/trust.  The aesthetic of MySpace, I believe, created a subliminal trust barrier because it emphasized our differences instead of what naturally draws us together.  Facebook on the other hand has standard profiles that allow users to just control the information that they share.  Even MySpace’s name emphasizes individuality over community.  MySpace.  Not YourSpace or OurSpace.  MySpace.

Facebook’s introduction to the market and it’s origin as an elite-college social network gave it an incubation period that was healthy for the development of it’s culture.  While most see students as crazy, reckless and impulsive (which they usually are), I’d argue they are the most aware of and in-tune with social influences that permeate their circles.  Being a college student is tough.  A completely new set of people in your life forces you to connect with a new set of friends and communities for you to express yourself.  As young adults gain more independence to explore and own their self-expression, they also become very aware of how they are perceived and this gives them an incentive to actively control that perception.  This isn’t just true of college students.  Teens and even kids in grade school are highly aware of social status, what’s cool and what isn’t.  This aspect of student culture transfered to the early iterations of Facebook as students on the network were highly aware that their profile could easily be the first impression they make on a number of people.  When you don’t know whether your crush or your arch-enemy is reading up on your activities, interests and groups, you tend to self-censor a little more carefully.  This leads to profiles that are a little tamer, but ultimately more inviting to connection with a wider net of people because there are fewer outlier/alienating elements included in profiles.  The profiles also more closely reflect the real-life expression of our identity because most of us are very proficient at controlling our perceptions through self-censorship.

Fast forward to 2010 and social networks have begun to dominate discussion in the advertising world and among thought-leaders developing tomorrow’s business models.  The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is one of those thought-leaders.  He sees Facebook and the social web overtaking search engines as the primary portal through which people interface with the web.  I won’t argue with this point.  I do believe as the social web will continue to develop and deepen digital relationships, that social networks will become our homepage and primary reason for going online, but I also believe that search engines and the information-web have a unique role independent of the social-web.

Those who argue that the internet experience is converging into one portal that people will use both socially and to seek information seem to ignore the fact that digital technology, in almost every instance, begins to mimic our real life experience.  If our real life were 100% social and all of the information we learned was through our friends and family, then I’d jump right on the bandwagon for a one-portal interface solution to the internet.  This is not the case though.  We seek information from sources outside our social sphere and interact with the world in many ways that have nothing to do with our friends.  Sure, we seek the opinion of our peers on subjects, but many people prefer to develop their own perspective before letting others influence their opinion.  How is that possible if social networks and the influence of our peers is interwoven with all of our internet experience?

In the end, I don’t see the information-web and social-web experiences converging into a single solution for all your internet needs.  Facebook and other social networking services like Twitter and Foursquare have a long way to go before they have maximized their online potential because they’re only starting to integrate themselves tangibly into our real life experiences.  The power of digital word-of-mouth is only starting to be felt because consumers are still acclimating to the idea of expressing opinions online.  The rise of blogging, Twitter, status updates and viral content online is helping drive this expression to the mainstream.  As opinion expression spreads through the culture of the internet and more people become comfortable with sharing their thoughts online, businesses will be forced to listen and encourage this feedback because it will provide them invaluable data on their customers that they’ve never really had access to before.  From a research perspective, think of social media as the largest representative sample in the history of research.

Personal expression is extremely important to the growth and integration of the Internet as a ubiquitous aspect of our everyday lives, but the web as a source of independent information and cataloging will always be a part of our user-experience.  A converged Internet would be like living in a world without libraries or bookstores where you could only borrow buy books based on your friend’s interests and literary purchase history.  There is no winner in this war between social and independent portal experiences because the “battle” is just a narrative that has been developed based on too narrow of a perspective.  The user-experience will eventually converge in it’s ubiquity, but diverge in the expression of that ubiquity, ultimately reflecting the very complexity of those who created the experience.

As always, feedback and comments are appreciated, so don’t be shy!  The topics I just covered are entirely too complex for a 1300 word blog post, so if you think I missed something big or am thinking about something in the wrong context, let’s discuss!