Many website owners focus on the quantity rather than the quality of clicks when they open up their Google Analytics dashboard. But the quality of your clicks is far more important. Luckily, you can determine that easily by your bounce rate—the percentage of visitors who come to your site but leave shortly after arriving.

Visitor numbers and campaign performance are key areas of interest when examining site traffic using Google Analytics, but you should give the bounce rate equal attention. In the video below, Avinash Kaushik, Google's digital marketing evangelist, calls the bounce rate "the sexiest metric ever. It helps you ask the right questions. It will help you quickly distill down where things are not going right."

1. Set a baseline for a good bounce rate
Bounce rates will be different for every website, but there are situations where you will have an unnaturally high bounce rate. If you have a blog or site that lists all of your posts or content on your first page, your bounce rate will be unnaturally high as users enter, read new posts, and leave. Kaushik states that a good bounce rate for a standard website is between 40 and 60 percent.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook is testing a new feature dubbed "collections" that lets users create wish lists of products by clicking on "want" or "collect" buttons.

Some test pages sport a "collect" button, which lets users save an item to a collection called "products" and allows a user's friends to see the activity in their news feeds—similar to the way users can see which pages their friends “like.” Other test pages display a want or like button to do the same thing, visible within the news feeds of friends of friends. All three buttons add the chosen items to the user's Timeline as part of a new "products" section.

At this point, the features reflect how Pinterest works; the collectable items are mostly photographs found on the Facebook pages of a chosen handful of test brands.

Currently, only the Facebook pages of Pottery Barn, Wayfair, Victoria's Secret, Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus, Smith Optics, and Fab.com support collections. If you want to see the new buttons in action, you’ll have to like one of those pages, then find a photo there of a product it sells, such as one of these Smith Optics images.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What's the tangible, money-in-the-bank benefit of a Facebook follower? Social marketing mavens have pondered the question for years and we're still not any closer to a hard answer. Facebook last month swept fake "Likes" from its pages, to the chagrin of spammers. But do efforts at gaming the social network even pay off? If you're using Facebook for legitimate marketing, what's the ROI of having virtual fans?

Depending on who you ask and the metrics you use, a Facebook follower could be worth nothing at all, as little as $3.60, as much as $22.93, exactly $136.38 more than a non-follower, or a whopping $214.81 for a nonprofit organization.

That's a lot of numbers—and a gaping variation in the value of a "Like." Where does the truth lie?

Ecwid, an e-shopping cart provider and the self-proclaimed "second largest store-building application on Facebook," explored the data from the 40,000-plus Facebook stores that run on its software to try and determine the answer. The results Ecwid provided me are far from definitive, but they sure are interesting.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Traditional wisdom—and online ad budgets—measure success in clicks. While that may work for ads on Google, Facebook says that focusing on the per-click return isn't the best method for businesses seeking to spread brand awareness. Per-click metrics don't show the "outcomes that happen in the grocery store, in the car dealership, or in the local coffee shop," said Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s director of pricing and measurement, as TechCrunch reported Monday.

Instead, the real value lies in overall impressions, according to Smallwood. Reach and impressions have long formed the backbone of TV advertising, but online ads have tended to favor per-click metrics, a concrete way to know how many people saw an ad. Yet, click-throughs typically make up a tiny 5 percent or less of an ad's overall impression numbers. 

Facebook hopes to determine the true value of an ad impression. It wants to know, for example, if Facebook users exposed to a multitude of V8 ads more likely to buy the tomato juice at the store than those who were not.

Facebook thinks so, and it hopes Datalogix's data can prove it. Datalogix says it has sales metrics from more than 100 million U.S. households, 10 billion-plus individual transactions, and more than a trillion dollars' worth of purchases, all obtained by tracking customer loyalty cards issued by retailers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If you listen to conventional wisdom, LinkedIn is a vast sea of potential hires, all just waiting to jump onboard your company. The good news: LinkedIn indeed holds deep recruiting potential. The bad news: Rock star candidates won't start banging on your door just because you've whipped together a basic LinkedIn profile.

As with all recruiting efforts, mining LinkedIn for talent takes time and effort. Here's how your business can tap into the world’s largest professional network and find the right person for the right job.

First, let's start with some basic stuff.

1. It all starts with you. LinkedIn is built around connections. The more people you (and your HR staff) know, the larger your extended network becomes, opening up the ability to see the names and bios of your connections' connections, and even people you have three degrees of separation from. In other words, don't be bashful.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You may be more than the sum of your parts, but to Klout, you're just a number. The analytics company monitors your interactions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond. It then sorts through the data to generate a numeric score that purportedly "measures a person’s overall online influence" on a scale from 1 to 100.

A tweak to Klout's algorithm in August was designed to improve accuracy, pulling in more variables and identifying "real world reach" with factors as Wikipedia mentions.

That number's accuracy is critical for more than online bragging rights. Companies pay Klout to offer Klout Perks—"products or experiences" to encourage high-scoring users to spread the word about their brand. For example, American Express gave $25 gift cards to encourage Klout "influencers" to shop during its Small Business Saturday event last November.

But do Klout scores generate enough ROI to warrant your small business's attention? Are Klout Perk campaigns worth the effort?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As social networks continue to grow, businesses are scrambling to grab customer attention and convert it to dollars. Some companies, however, aren't afraid to turn towards sleazier methods to amplify brand awareness. Gartner Research predicted today that 10 to 15 percent of all social media reviews by the end of 2014 will be fake critiques paid for by unscrupulous advertisers.

Gartner suggests that most of the paid-for reviews won't include disclosure about the reviewer's relationship with the reviewee, which could land both parties in legal hot water. In fact, the firm expects at least two Fortune 500 companies to come under fire by the FTC for attempting to game the social system over the next two years.

"Many marketers have turned to paying for positive reviews with cash, coupons and promotions including additional hits on YouTube videos in order to pique site visitors' interests in the hope of increasing sales, customer loyalty and customer advocacy," said Gartner analyst Jenny Sussin, in a press release.

Why fake it?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amid so many tweets, status updates, and SMS messages, it can be easy to lose sight that "social" doesn't necessarily mean "brief," especially when it comes to internal communications. It's hard to talk about financing, customer relations, or a complex manufacturing process in 140 characters, after all.

It’s not necessarily something your customers and competitors will see—and a public-facing blog is a different beast entirely. Given their nature, internal blogs aren't a great tool for managing the finer details of a project. Yet an internal blog, safe and sound on your company Intranet or behind password protection on a third-party service, lets employees bounce ideas around and disseminate their experiences rapidly and informally.

Internal blogs have many upsides:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If your organization's social media initiatives have fizzled more than fostered debate, don't despair: yours isn't the only one. Social media has taken the mainstream by storm, but its adoption in the business world has been more uneven. Why is the road to better internal discussion often so rocky?

"I was speaking to a very senior IT leader at a large Fortune 500 company, and she was telling me that they had spent a lot of money on a content management system for their employees," Pisoni told me in a telephone interview. "They had this large, complex, difficult to use CMS, and for some reason, her employees were 'too lazy' to use it, and instead they were bringing in their own tools.

"I couldn't help but be struck that this seemed totally backwards. She was saying that because her employees wouldn't use this byzantine thing that wouldn't work very well, they must be lazy. And I was thinking that the reason they weren't using it is not because they're lazy, but because they're essentially trying to innovate" and work around artificial limitations imposed by officially sanctioned social media tools.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The check-in feature at Facebook exemplifies location-based social media use at its simplest. When you check in on Facebook, you're just telling your Facebook Friends "Here I am!" Google+ and Yelp up the ante by encouraging users to leave reviews.

Other social networks are completely built around location-based services. They turn the process of checking in at various locations into a real-world game, complete with points, achievement badges, leaderboards, and the ability to win rewards and discounts at participating locations.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A person who follows your business's blog or Facebook account understands that he's opening the door to receiving the occasional pitch, but nobody enjoys being banged over the head with advertising day in and day out. When someone follows your business, it's because they want to engage your business, not be spammed by it. What's social about shoving the equivalent of a billboard in front of someone's face every half hour on Twitter?

In practice, this means simply cutting back on the blatant advertising. Many social media marketers suggest using an 80/20 rule: talk about interesting topics 80 percent of the time, and only actively sell your brand about 20 percent of the time. That's not a hard-and-fast rule, however. At the Intuit Small Business Blog, which won BtoB Magazine's award for the best corporate blog earlier this year, writers are actively discouraged from writing about Intuit products; in fact, they're required to consult the editor before doing so. (Full disclosure: I know, because I occasionally contribute to Intuit's blog.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fortunately, other tools allow you to manage your business’s assorted social media accounts from a single dashboard. We've selected the top five that are specifically geared toward small business. To make our list, each tool had to meet several criteria.

• Affordability: The tool is either free or priced low enough to meet the budget of a one- or two-person business.
• Scalability: The tool grows with your company's needs, even if you start with just one or two accounts.
• Support for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter: If a social media management tool doesn’t post to all three networks, it’s dead to most small businesses.
• Update posting assistance: The tool allows you to schedule posts in advance.

HootSuite

The free version does the job for microbusinesses with the standard Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts to update, and HootSuite Pro will work for small businesses that don't need to support more than two users. If you find yourself needing more-robust analytics and other features, it's time to upgrade to another tool.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The phrase "Facebook for business" was tossed around when the company was acquired; but in reality, Yammer does much more than Mark Zuckerberg's baby. Here's an overview of what everyone is Yammer-ing about.

A Social Network for Your Business

Yammer is essentially a social network that’s entirely focused on your business. In order to join your business's Yammer network, an applicant must have a working email address from your company's domain. You can also create external networks to allow non-employees, such as suppliers and customers, to communicate with your company.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

That will change soon, however. According to TechCrunch, Facebook is rolling out a bevy of new targeting options that will allow Pages to send posts to the News Feeds of specific followers based on very granular profile criteria, including the fan's age, relationship status, interests, gender, workplace, education level, and schools attended.

Coupled with the service's existing geo-targeting tools and Page admins' new-found ability to schedule posts, running a highly targeted, partially automated engagement campaign is soon to become fairly easy with Facebook.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Even in 2012, only 22 percent of respondents stated that they felt that online shopping was the safest, even though there is just as much likelihood that your credit or debit card can be used for fraudulent purposes at a retail location as there is of your data being hacked or stolen by an online fraudster. The three times I personally have been a victim of fraud, each incident happened at either a retail store or a gas station and involved my debit card being copied.

Media reports of retail giants being hacked don't make consumers feel any more secure, but there's nothing you can do about that. You can look at security certificates for your website that assure the customer that you are doing everything you can to protect their data. McAfee's Web Security Seal is one of the more recognizable and trusted brand names, but there are many more out there. McAfee will ensure that your protocols meet the rules for PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance for credit-card acceptance, and it will continuously scan your website for vulnerabilities.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Making the leap into social business isn't easy for any organization. So we like to ask our colleagues in the field for their insights from time to time. This week, we pose five tough questions to Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, co-authors of Social Business By Design.

1. Concepts in social media are constantly evolving, and it's often difficult for business leaders to get their heads around social tools in the workplace. What do you mean when you use the phrase "Social Business"?


Social business is the intentional use of social media to drive meaningful, strategic business outcomes. Social media isn't a technology fad or a means to free online marketing impressions -- it can be used for significant, sustainable, transformative value creation. By intentionally designing new social business models with customers, employees, and value chain partners, any forward-thinking organization can direct and guide social business efforts to drive high value, high scale, cost effective business outcomes.

2. With a down economy and tightening resources, why should companies be focused on integrating social media into their already challenging workflows?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

But recently published statistics from e-commerce software developer Ecwid indicate that either those analysts’ conclusions were premature, or Facebook commerce is merely better suited to smaller businesses right now. Among its more than 35,000 clients that run both stand-alone online stores and Facebook storefronts, Ecwid reports that nearly 18 percent of those clients’ Q1 2012 revenues were generated by their Facebook stores. Meanwhile, Wishpond, another company focused on helping retailers build Facebook storefronts, recently reported an uptick in interest in its products following the debut of the Facebook Timeline profile earlier this year. If Gamestop, JC Penney, and Nordstrom had held on for just a few more months, would they also have seen an increase in their Facebook store sales?

Building a Facebook storefront is relatively inexpensive--or even free, if you already have a fan page and a PayPal account--so small businesses with the patience to stick it out for a few months might wish to give it a shot. Here’s a look at some of the related products and services on the market, most of which promise seamless integration between your online store, your inventory-management software, and your Facebook page.

Ecwid

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Marketing gurus pushed email newsletters hard back in the days before social networking. If you believe everything you read online these days, you'd think that Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other Web 2.0 services have left such vehicles in the virtual dust. Not so. Nor has the scourge of spam destroyed newsletters' effectiveness. Email marketing still achieves huge results--and pairing an effective email newsletter with a social media campaign can snag many more customers for your business than relying on social media alone.

Survey respondents named email newsletters and notifications as their third-favorite means of discovering what a merchant had to offer, behind a direct visit to a company’s website (in which case you’ve likely already earned the consumer’s loyalty) and print materials (which are considerably more expensive to produce and send). By contrast, Facebook was the favorite of just 3 percent of holiday shoppers surveyed; Twitter, a measly 1 percent.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Increase your visibility with a company page

If you look at LinkedIn’s users as potential customers, employees and business partners, it becomes clear the networking site is a grand stage on which to tell your brand story. There’s no easier way to start than to create a company page. This profile offers you a central hub to provide an overview of your business, showcase products and services and attract new talent. Facebook like features allow you to build a following and engage with customers directly through status updates and content sharing. There’s even an analytics feature that gives insight into your audience and your page’s effectiveness.

Generate new leads

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Social media has transformed the way we connect with each other. We all have a voice, and we make ourselves heard, sharing wisdom and gossip, connecting with new friends, and documenting our lives. This new communication channel has empowered us and changed our expectations of the world, including the companies with which we interact.

Today, we are more influenced by comments from friends and anonymous reviews than we are from traditional online or TV ads that we easily ignore. That means the game is changing for businesses of all sizes and types. It’s no longer about telling your customers what to think and do. It’s about listening and engaging, guiding and supporting. Creating a Facebook page is a start, but let’s be clear: Having a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter isn’t enough. People, not sites, are the fabric of the new Web.

As a company, it’s not only possible, but also imperative, to develop a relationship with each of your customers. Here’s how:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

By contrast, today's workplace (mine and, probably, yours too) is fairly asynchronous. Many of us work remotely or from the road a good deal of the time. Everyone's juggling multiple complex projects, making it difficult to sync up schedules enough for live, real-time meetings. And when we do manage to line up a meeting, many of us have no choice but to attend by phone, introducing additional communications challenges that can reduce the clarity of the message. (I take a hefty portion of my meetings by phone, and far too many of them while driving a car, walking through an airport, or in an otherwise distracted state.) In this asynchronous workplace, where it's increasingly difficult to get all of our key players focused on the same task at the same time, social collaboration tools are essential to good communication.

"Social collaboration" can mean a lot of things, of course. In my organization, we're social omnivores and use an array of great tools, from Google Apps to Yammer to Basecamp, among others. What I'm talking about here are tools like Salesforce, Basecamp, and Socialtext, which give teams the ability to capture and share progress around critical projects without the time-sucking burden of clearing schedules for a synchronous meeting.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Even as social media presents unprecedented business opportunities for marketing, customer service, brand building and consumer relationships, many organizations are still struggling to embrace it for fear that it negatively effects worker productivity or puts the company at risk. A 2011 survey by Society for Human Resource Management reveals that 43% of businesses block access to social media on company-owned computers or handheld devices.

Rather than policing employees, these organizations would be better served by a social media governance model -- a collection of policies, procedures and educational resources that allow you to manage social media internally. A sound social media governance model empowers your employees while keeping them accountable. It allows you to quickly recover from a blow to your brand, or even sidestep it completely. It helps you keep your social initiatives on track and aligned with your business’ strategic goals.

While many of the elements of a social media governance model will vary across industries and organizations, here are five fundamental components that should be part of any plan.

Social Media Policy

A social media policy is the foundation of any social media governance model. Its purpose is twofold: to guide your employees and to protect your organization and your customers from risk. You should have a social media policy regardless of whether or not your business is actively engaged in a social media strategy. Facebook is on target to hit one billion users this year, and Twitter will soon have 500 million. Many of them are your employees, customers and competitors.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

Good leaders know how to delegate, so there's no great shock in the observation that most business leaders offload social media projects to underlings, henchmen, and Twitter-savvy interns. But as in so many areas of 21st-century business, the anachronistic nature of the social web has changed the rules and turned the delegation instinct into a liability.

Here's why:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A report published last week illuminates just how some organizations are using social tools inside and outside their enterprise and what results they’re seeing, and it’s worth a read.

The report “When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done” shows tangible gains from the use of social initiatives within organizations of all sizes. Written by MIT professor Andrew McAfee, the paper reveals the results of an AIIM study that looked at the progress of social business technologies in organizations from 10 to over 5,000 employees, with a focus on three use cases: sales and marketing collaboration, open innovation and enterprise Q&A.

"All three areas addressed by the Task Force demonstrate that when people engage properly with each other and with technology, trust, self-organization, and good business results emerge," McAfee said in a press release. "The three use cases are true examples of social business because they depend on people with strong, weak and potential ties to organize their own workflows, roles and credentials."

McAfee knows a few things about social business, having coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article and authored the book "Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization's Toughest Challenges."

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

While there are undoubtedly some major differences between managing a company's relationship to its customers and managing your own interpersonal relationships, the basics of both are pretty similar. Here are four fundamental social principles to consider before you launch a social campaign. (And if you're already on the social web, they should help you get more traction from your efforts.)

1. Be a Good Listener

It's always awkward walking into the middle of a conversation. And for brands on the social web, it can be disastrous. Using social listening tools like Radian6 or Sprout Social to monitor ongoing chatter about your brand and competition can prepare you to act strategically from your very first post. This may sound simple to social media pros who represent prominent brands, but small businesses more often tend to leap onto Twitter without really looking at what they're getting themselves into. Effective social listening tools can cost less than $10 a month and save you the potentially costly embarrassment of a social misstep on the web.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

With Facebook on track to reach one billion users, reports that 75% of marketers will increase their social media spending this year, and predictions that social media will transform TV and influence the presidential election, it’s no wonder 2012 has been touted as the “Year of Social Media.”

Hyperbolic headlines like these might convince you that if you don’t incorporate social media into your business, you’ll soon be out of business. But before you race to register a Twitter account or create a Facebook fan page, you should check a few of your assumptions. Is it really necessary for you to be part of these two social networks? Sure, they’re the most popular platforms and likely your competitors are already using them – both compelling reasons – but that doesn’t mean either of them is the best option for you.

There’s a universe of social media platforms available with a variety of capabilities, some of which will be more suited to your business needs than others. Effective social media strategies take money and resources, two things most businesses today have in short supply. And despite the cacophony of voices that would have you believe that 100,000 Facbook followers or a steady diet
of a half-dozen Tweets a day is the magic bullet for all your marketing ills, marketing may in fact be the least valuable -- and most unnecessarily limiting -- social media tactic for your business. To maximize your investment, you need to decide what the best use of social media is for you. Here are a few things for you to consider.

Define Your Needs

We’ve all heard about Social Media’s much-trumpeted power to create relationships with consumers and build brand awareness. Indeed, social media has opened up a wealth of marketing opportunities. But before you plunge into the social pool, you need to decide how relevant these objectives are to your business. What if your needs are more modest? Maybe you just want to increase foot traffic to your store. Perhaps your biggest challenge has nothing to do with your customers, but rather your company’s communication is vexed by the geographical gulf between offices. The point is Social Media is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and clarifying your needs if the first step to tailoring it to your business.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.")

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.

What We're About

If "Go Social" were just about social media (in the broad sense), it would scarcely justify its own existence, let alone all the effort we're committing to it. Instead, this blog is very specifically about social business. That entails social media marketing, certainly, but it’s about much more than marketing. When we say "Go Social," we mean "go social across your entire organization." Because we’re convinced that the greater potential of the social web is about much more than driving awareness and conversion in the marketplace (though those are clearly valuable objectives).. We believe social media still represents a vast undiscovered country of remarkable possibilities -- not just for marketing and business, but for society at large.

We're committed to uncovering the most promising opportunities that social media presents for companies of all sizes and in all industries. Not just within sales and marketing organizations, but across the whole org chart. In truth, there may be some companies for which marketing could prove the least valuable application of social media, and for which interdepartmental communication may prove most valuable. Social tools can be as effective at overhauling broken internal communication processes as at opening new lines of contact with customers.

We're committed to finding and explaining strategies and practices that really work for real business. High-minded strategic thinking is fun, but we seldom do business with people who can afford to invest their finite resources in novel technology services just for the sake of appearing "cutting edge." So we're going to assume you’re a busy person who really needs to get things done within your business, and we'll do our very best to present you only with information that helps you get real results.

We're committed to you, the reader. We know how valuable your attention is, and we'll try never to lose sight of that. So before we post anything -- either written by us or by a guest contributor -- we'll give it due scrutiny to ensure that it's worthy of your eyes.

Above all, this blog is our small contribution to a greater search for truth. So we'll apply a healthy dose of skepticism to novel concepts and questioning common assumptions in the service of delivering the most valuable content we possible can. We’ll do our level best to weed out the empty hype of social media charlatans and focus in on the most valuable applications of social tools, backed up by evidence and experience.

If you'd like to share your thoughts with us, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach Michael Ansaldo and Robert Strohmeyer on Twitter, and you can get us both at once through our @ContentWorks feed. Or speak up in the comments section of our posts. However you like to communicate, we want to know what you think. And if you're a social business pro with a perspective to share, send us an email at contentworks@pcworld.com. We can't guarantee every submission will get posted, but we'll give each one a fair read and a sincere response.