Robert Strohmeyer, Tom Spring

Few companies do more when it comes to embedding secrets into their products than Google. In tech parlance these hidden surprises are called Easter Eggs and range from whimsical images, entire games, or silly secret features that magically make teddy bears appear on your computer screen.

Tech Easter Eggs have nothing to with the Christian holiday Easter other than the fact that coders love to hide them and people love to find them -- just like the Easter Bunny delivering goodies and millions of kids carrying baskets searching for plastic eggs filled with candy.

Five months after Amazon debuted its $200 "game-changing" tablet, the Kindle Fire is feeling more like a McDonald's hamburger next to Apple's prime-rib, third-generation iPad.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Since PCWorld's first roundup of recommended Kindle Fire apps, a cavalcade of new apps, tips, and hacks that breathe new life into the tablet have surfaced.

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.

Key members of the hacking collective known as LulzSec were arrested Tuesday morning, a move authorities are calling “devastating to the organization.” According to an exclusive report by Foxnews.com LulzSec’s alleged ringleader, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York City, helped authorities with the arrest.

Credit: Foxnews.com's exclusive image of LulzSec's alleged ringleader Hector Xavier Monsegur.Tuesday’s arrests included five LulzSec members: two from London, two from Ireland, and one from Chicago. LulzSec, also known as Lulz Security, is an offshoot of the Anonymous hackers group. Together the two groups have been blamed for hacking into the CIA, FBI, Sony, defense contractors, and the government websites of Great Britain and Mexico.

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.

Are you wondering how that mysterious icon ended up on your Android phone's start screen? Annoyed at the ads clogging your notification bar? You aren't alone. Thousands of Android apps now include software that shoves marketing icons onto your phone's start screen or pushes advertising into your notification bar--and many of the apps give you no warning about the ad invasion.

Many of these ads come from mobile marketing firms such as AirPush, Appenda, LeadBolt, Moolah Media, and StartApp. The companies work with app developers hungry for some way to make money from their smartphone software. By bundling their adware into popular Android programs, these marketing companies say they are now pushing ads to millions of new smartphones each week.

Scareware has gone mobile: Users of Android devices are starting to see sleazy ads warning that they need to upgrade their device's battery. The supposed battery-saver apps that those ads prod you to download, however, could endanger your privacy or siphon money from your wallet--and generally they'll do nothing to improve your gadget's battery life, security experts say.

In some cases you don't even need to agree to download the apps. For example, PCWorld spotted one ad on an Android phone for a battery utility called Battery Upgrade. Tapping the ad--even by accident--launches the phone's Web browser, which automatically initiates the download of the app's installer file on the Android device.

For Apple's users, Steve Jobs was more than just a CEO -- much more.

For some, Jobs will be remembered as a consumer tech visionary developing groundbreaking products such as the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

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.