Becky Waring, PC World, Robert Strohmeyer

Salesforce ChatterWhether your company is a small shop of just a few intensely hard-working pros or a large venture with hundreds or thousands of workers, good communication is critical to your success. And by "good communication," I mean communication that works. With the right collaboration tools and a little operational discipline, you can overcome any communications challenge and get your teams in sync.

When I started my career back in the olden days of the 20th Century, the workplace was largely synchronous. For the most part, everyone showed up at more or less the same time, worked in the same office together, went to the same meetings, ate lunch at 12:30, and gathered around the same water cooler when they felt like taking a break. Communication wasn't always of the highest quality, but there was plenty of it and if you missed something, somebody was always right there to fill you in.

LG introduced today today the Optimus Vu, a combo tablet-smartphone LTE device with a 5-inch display to support easier multimedia viewing and ebook reading.  

The Optimus Vu will be on display at the Mobile World Congress next week and will be introduced in Korea in March, LG representatives say; no global availability or pricing was disclosed.

I've ranted before against the perils of delegated social strategies. You know: Management decides it's time to get into social media, and appoints some whippersnapper to the task. The potential perils with this approach are many and severe, but even under good circumstances, this approach comes with a steep lost-opportunity cost. And that -- even if we ignore all the ways a lone-gunman social strategy can backfire on a good company -- is a very compelling reason to spend less energy thinking about your business's social strategy and more energy thinking about your company's social culture.

In a delightfully insightful opinion post on Fast Company last week, Bulldog Drummond CEO Shawn Parr advanced the observation that "culture eats strategy for lunch." The point, in brief, is that no matter how much strategic thinking you do, the culture of your company will either bolster your success or unravel your elegantly wrought plans. And while Parr didn't talk about social specifically, it occurred to me that this is a great opportunity for some dialog about the overwhelming impact of company culture on the effectiveness of social campaigns.

There's no shortage of talk about engagement in marketing circles, but really honestly engaging with people (not just customers, but any target audience) is a lot harder than most of us are willing to admit. It takes real work. It takes creativity. It takes a sincere desire to understand the people whose influence can elevate your brand. And, critically, it takes a commitment to create social content that resonates with the personalities you're trying to reach.

At the start of the social gold rush, the prevailing attitude among businesses that "got it" was that we just needed to get in there and join the conversation. Social media strategies focused on figuring out ways to crank up follower counts. Quickly, though, savvy brands realized they needed to do something more, and there are now -- happily -- hundreds of companies out there creating genuine, mutually valuable relationships with their customers on the social web through thoughtfully executed strategies that reward customer interaction.

Does the world really need another blog about social media? We invested some serious effort into exploring this question before making the decision to launch "Go Social," the blog you're reading now. (As you might have surmised, the conclusion we came to was "yes.")

There's no shortage of chatter about social media on the web, but much of it -- in our opinion, anyway -- remains too tightly focused on a narrow set of use cases loosely described as "marketing." The lion's share appears dedicated to the dubious aim of getting more followers, getting more shares or retweets, or "going viral" (whatever that means). But it’s not clear to us what followers, as a numerical value, actually do for a business. Shares and retweets may be a vague indicator of engagement, but only if they come from (and go out to) genuinely engaged human audiences. And "going viral" is, more often than not, an objective doomed to failure.

So while there's a lot of noise on the web about using social media in business, relatively little of that chatter actually helps businesses to discover the potential value of social media across the whole spectrum of business use cases and guides companies in developing holistic strategies and practical tactics for putting social tools to work inside and outside their organizations. This blog aims to do exactly those things.

Who We Are

Over time, we'll work hard to make sure "Go Social" exemplifies the principles it espouses. That is to say, it'll be open, inquisitive, interactive, and engaged with its audience on the social web. While we'll always uphold PCWorld's high editorial standards in choosing which content to serve on this blog, we intend to open it up to outside contributors whose perspectives illuminate the broader landscape of social business.

Anchoring the blog on a week-to-week basis will be Robert Strohmeyer and Michael Ansaldo, two veteran technology journalists who've written for a wide selection of top tech sites over the past couple of decades, and who now put their collective energies to work creating impactful social media and content campaigns for top-tier technology partners through our company’s content marketing service, PCWorld Content Works.

Few tools of modern technology have become as prevalent as the cell phone, which allows you to be in touch (almost) all the time, (almost) anywhere. And you can do more than just talk--today's phones let you send and receive email and text messages, surf the Web, and play music and videos. Sifting through the sea of service plans and handsets can be difficult, but we'll walk you through what you need to know to get the phone and service plan that are right for you.

If you don't have to own the latest and greatest smartphone, there’s no time like the present to buy a new one. From the newest iPhone to an Android superphone to a business-friendly Windows Phone, you can find the right phone for you. Before you hit the stores, however, do a bit of research and read our guide so that you'll know exactly what to look for.

With telecommuters and outside contractors now serving vital roles in most small to midsize companies, it has become increasingly important to be able to meet face-to-face with people across the building, across town, or across the ocean without physically transporting ourselves around.

Fortunately, video-based conferencing services have evolved to meet this demand, making it easier than ever to share documents, demonstrate software, and work collaboratively on a shared whiteboard from the comfort of your desktop PC.

So you’re reading an article online and you’d like a little background on something mentioned in the text. If you’re like most people, your first instinct is to pop open a new tab and google the phrase. But if you have the Apture plugin installed in your browser, you can simply highlight the phrase and let Apture do the searching for you without even leaving the current tab.

Apture is a plugin for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It doesn’t take any maintenance or attention. Instead, it just activates whenever you highlight a phrase in your browser. When you highlight a phrase, Apture pops up a little Learn More menu and automatically starts searching for the highlighted phrase on Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Images, Twitter, and other sites in the background. If you click the Learn More button, Apture will pop open a box of results for you within your current tab.

Apple makes a lot of noise about the size of its iOS app store, and there's something to be said for selection, sure. But in my view, having the most apps isn't the same as having the best apps, and I generally like what I get with Android more. Of course, that's not an objective statement about the merits of the two platforms; it's a subjective, personal preference. But one thing I don't like about Android's App Market is its slightly-too-open open-door policy on app submissions. That's why I download my apps from Amazon these days.

In contrast to Apple, which has developed something of a complex reputation when it comes to its app approval process, Google prefers to put apps online first and let users discover which ones need to be rejected. It's an open, crowdsourced policy that's very much in line with Google's overall operating philosophy. The upside is that you can get cool apps in the Android Market that have no good equivalents on iOS due for reasons having to do with Apple's business strategy. The downside is that every once in a while Google has to pull a bunch of apps from its market after users discover security threats embedded in the apps.

At least a few times a day, I need to quickly cross-reference information from two different Web sites at the same time. Usually I just pop the tabs out into separate pages and align them side by side, but that involves more mouse movements than I care to bother with, and it makes it tougher than it should be to keep Word open beside the Web windows to copy and paste information as needed. But a cool plugin for Google Chrome called Frame Two Pages makes this task really easy.

Frame Two Pages is a simple plugin that combines two tabs into one. Once you install the plugin, open up two pages that you’d want to combine. When you click the plugin’s icon, it will combine the current tab with the next one to the left. You then choose to place them side by side as columns or one on top of the other as rows by hitting 1 or 2 when prompted.

If you're an Outlook veteran recently exiled to Gmail, the service has recently added a feature that should warm your little heart. It's called Preview Pane, and it gives Gmail a three-column view complete with instant previews of your mail messages, just like Outlook does.

To activate Preview Pane in Gmail, click the little gear icon in the upper-right corner of the window, and then click Labs. Scroll down the alphabetical list to the Preview Pane option, and click Enable. Click Save Changes at the top or bottom of the list.

So you have this file and you don't know how to open it. The person who sent it to you doesn't seem to know either, and your deadline is ticking nearer. What do you do? Head to Go2Convert.com.

Go2Convert is a handy little site that's not much to look at but serves an incredibly useful function. Upload any file in practically any format, and it'll let you convert it into something you can use.