As Alex Bard, the Vice President and General Manager of Desk.com explained to us, Salesforce talked to thousands of SMBs and found that they needed customer support that was social, mobile, and simple. Bard told us that, because customer support was such a challenging area, they wanted to create a tool that managed all these areas in a simplistic way.

Desk.com also provides analytics in order to give businesses insight into where they need to improve.

According to Bard, the first seat for the service is free, and from there, subscriptions start at $49 per month. For those casual members that only need to occasional access, the charge is $1 per hour.

Do you think Desk.com will improve customer service for SMBs? Let us know.

WebProNews spoke with Kara Nortman, the Senior Vice President at Urbanspoon, who told us that people often forget what restaurants they’ve been to and what they’ve eaten. For this reason, Urbanspoon wanted to create a way for people to remember these experiences.

At this point, the updated app is available on the Web and the iOS platform. However, Nortman told us that it would soon be available on the Android platform as well.

In an interview with Abby Johnson, Fox started by defining a few terms.  Earned media is “when someone says something about you, rather than you saying it yourself.”  Paid media is then “when you pay to place your content on a third-party channel,” while owned media is “your own channel.”

Next, Fox stressed that it’s important to combine these media types when marketing something, since this approach carries the content to a much wider audience.  Using multiple channels – like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, for example – is important, too.

Worried about the expense or lack of other companies in the field?  Don’t.  Fox has seen paid social efforts achieve a clickthrough rate of 0.55 percent, whereas a display campaign might be lucky to achieve 0.09 percent.

Also, she explained that the main thing keeping companies from adopting social media marketing strategies is just a lack of awareness, followed by a lack of knowledge.

About 70 percent of Internet users spend time on social media platforms, Fox pointed out, so social media marketing is just a matter of going to where people are.  She stressed, “Social needs to be woven into the DNA of the organization.”

To provide a little background data: comScore statistics indicated in January that Chatroulette received 109,000 unique visitors. By February, the number had jumped to 960,000.

The site also received all sorts of media attention around that time. Still, as with Twitter, there was the problem of monetization. Andres Palmiter, an online video sales specialist at comScore, said in an interview with Abby Johnson that advertisers wondered, “What can I do with content that I have no control over?”

And specifically, sexual content on the site started to cause a lot of concern.

A promise on Chatroulette’s part to cooperate with authorities and a site redesign haven’t done a lot to address these problems. More recent comScore data shows that unique visitors are growing fewer in number, too.

Chatroulette’s definitely hit a bump. It should be interesting to see if the once-hot property can keep from fading away.

As Cole, who holds the title “Director of Sales, Platform Services,” noted, MapQuest recently launched version 6.0 of the MapQuest Actionscript / Flex SDK. As a result, developers have all sorts of nifty stuff at their disposal, including new controls and the option to let users drag routes.

MapQuest also introduced a “Share to Facebook” feature not too long ago, which is nice for lots of reasons. If a number of friends are taking separate cars to one place, for example, this will help them decide if and when they should meet up along the way. Or solo travelers’ friends can look at their route and suggest the best spots to eat and stay.

Then here’s one other important detail Cole shared: “We’re one of the most downloaded applications on the iPhone, despite the fact that other options are built in.”

Developer involvement, social media, and the mobile market all seem poised to play important roles in the future of mapping, then.

McCann is the CEO of Gist, which “helps you build stronger relationships by connecting the inbox to the web.” He told Abby Johnson, “I think what’s changing very rapidly is just basic communication.”

McCann then gave one broad example by explaining, “There are social features coming to email and email coming to social features.”

Specific instances of this crossover cited by McCann include Google Buzz, Outlook Social Connector, and Salesforce Chatter. The fact that Facebook shifted app notifications to email says something, too.

All in all, McCann believes that “the overlap or combination of multiple forms of electronic communication” is “the place that’s most interesting to be playing in.”

Another social media website they recommend is StumbleUpon. Like its title, StumbleUpon provides a way to “stumble upon,” or discover, and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. StumbleUpon also ranks each webpage based on the user’s ratings. According to Kelley and Copland, StumbleUpon is very consistent and offers solid results.

Twitter is another website discussed, but it did not receive the best review. Twitter attempts to answer the question, “What are you doing?” It is a service that allows users to send text-based posts, or updates, that are up to 140 characters long. These updates are displayed on the user’s profile page, as well as the pages of the users who have signed up to receive them. Users can respond to the updates via their phones, IM, or on the Web. Kelly and Copland have a few reasons why they do not recommend Twitter. They have noticed that it is not instantaneous, but rather has a 20-30 second delay on each update. They believe it to be of low value and bad quality.

For other recommended Web 2.0 websites, Kelley and Copland advise Craigslist, Go2web20, and TechCrunch. They are very impressed with Go2Web20 since it offers a complete Web 2.0 directory.

On a side note, be sure to keep a close watch on seomoz.org for Rebecca Kelley’s SES comics from the SES conference in New York. Rumor has it that there are some pretty embarrassing pictures!

Microsoft has also staffed more than 200 employees trained in Exchange and Outlook to answer phone calls. Microsoft has seen a 68 percent increase in support calls related to DST. Many computers require an update to adjust to the new time. Personal consumer support calls remain free, but Microsoft charges companies using Windows 2000, Exchange 2000 and Exchange five-point-five or any other products that don’t have mainstream support around four thousand dollars to patch up old products.

Connecticut lawmakers argued over a bill on Thursday to compel social-networking sites such as MySpace to confirm users’ ages and make minors to get parental consent before creating profiles. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal proposed the bill to shield children from sexual predators. Blumenthal sited six alleged sexual assaults in Connecticut with older men and under-aged girls linked to MySpace last year. Blumenthal said applicants would present a driver’s license or other form of identification and the Internet site would check the age, address and date of birth. Sites that don’t verify ages under 18 without parental consent could face civil penalties of up to five thousand dollars. If passed, this would signify the first bill in the United States to inflict rules on the social-networking sites.

Analysts think Yahoo will lose after a probable reorganizing of its deal with AT&T. The Wall Street Journal reported today that AT&T looks for a review of how the companies contribute to advertising and Internet access revenue in their years-long arrangement to sell cobranded broadband services to customers in the U.S. Yahoo obtains between 200 and 250 million dollars in annual revenue from the partnership, but the Wall Street Journal said AT&T seemed stronger and less dependent on Yahoo.

Yahoo’s stock dropped almost five percent of Friday.

Pope Benedict called a press conference on Friday to endorse family values and disapprove of the Internet and Television. The Pope believes both mediums have a “destructive” influence on young people. The Pope said the media had a “pervasive role in shaping culture,” and that the control has shifted from print to electronic media. The Pope asked for the media leaders to protect the common good, support the truth, guard human dignity and encourage respect for family needs.

Nonprofit online encyclopedia Wikipedia plans on building a search engine to secure five percent of the Internet search market. Founder Jimmy Wales expects Wikia to compete with Google and Yahoo. Wikia will focus on specific markets and make money from advertising revenue. Wales said the collaborative search technology could change the power structure of the web. Wales acknowledged that the company received a four million dollar investment from “angel investors,” as well as a very large investment from Amazon.

Social Search. Linkbait. Pay-Per-Click. Organic. Local Search.

There are a myriad of different shades and brush strokes that comprise the portrait of search engine optimization. For Ben, however, local search seems to be the primary color of the search marketing canvas for his site. His goal at this year’s SES was to learn more about the subtleties of local search, and how it can be used to benefit his local business. The conference had a ton of information to offer in this field, to be sure, but here at WebProNews we go the extra mile in order to provide relevant and up-to-date insight from all corners of the blogosphere.

So here you go, Ben. Eight simple steps to make your page more local,
courtesy of Matt McGee at Search Engine Guide:

– Have your physical location on every page of your site.

– Have your local phone number on every page of your site.

– Give your physical address extra prominence on your “Contact Us” page.

– Create a page on your site called “Directions / Location”.

– Link to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps on your Location/Directions page.

– When possible, include your location in your page Titles.

– Somewhere on your site, list all the cities / towns your business
covers.

– Take advantage of internal linking opportunities with smart anchor
text.

Stay tuned to the WebProNews video blog for more great content from Search Engine Strategies in Chicago!