According to Alex Bard, the Vice President and General Manager of Desk.com, Salesforce developed the platform because it recognizes the challenges businesses have with customer service.

What’s the biggest challenge your business faces over customer service? Please share.

As Bard explained, Salesforce talked with thousands of businesses about their customer service needs. What they found was that these businesses want a customer service platform that is social, mobile, and simple.

“In today’s world, really the driving factor is the customer, and the customer is now social… the customer is now mobile… and the customer is global,” he said.

Social has quickly become an important component to businesses because it is such an integral part of everyday life. Simply put, it creates an ideal channel for reaching masses of people. Companies such as Southwest Airlines and Budweiser recognize this and have utilized social channels to handle and defuse any damaging situations.

“That pressure is forcing big companies and small businesses to revisit their tools and process and, really, philosophy around customer support,” said Bard.

He went on to say that investing in social was just as important as investing in traditional methods.

The mobile capability that businesses need is also very important because customer service issues happen any time during the day or night.

“For these businesses, business doesn’t stop when you leave the office,” said Bard.

Therefore, businesses need to be able to address these issues no matter where they are.

To answer the simplicity factor, Bard said Desk.com can be set up very quickly and doesn’t need IT help.

“[Desk.com] helps you capture all your interactions across these channels – social and traditional – it’s got a mobile aspect that helps you carry your help desk with you no matter where you go… and finally, it literally takes just minutes to set up,” Bard summed up.

Desk.com is geared toward small and medium-size businesses and also provides overall management capabilities such as easy reporting. As for pricing, the first seat is free, but every subscription added after that is $49 per month.

Do you see Desk.com helping to meet your customer service needs? Let us know.

Users will get notifications anytime they get a new follower or like.

When you have the extension installed, it will display a follow button whenever you’re on a site with RSS feeds, so you can easily follow it from your WordPress.com account. This includes not only WordPress sites, but blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, etc.

There’s a “press this” button, which lets you quickly post content to your blog without having to actually go to it. This gives you a box that looks like this:

It will even let you post an excerpt of text with a link by highlighting what you want to post before you click the button. Like I said: handy.

WebProNews is partnering with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. BlogWorld takes place November 3-5 in Los Angeles and includes speakers such as Kate Brodock. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

Answers to the following questions are Brodock’s .

What does it take to be successful in content curation?

“It comes down to a few key processes. You need to have good aggregation tools in place to gather and filter information. You then need to have a way to centralize and showcase that information in a way that communicates to your audience effectively. Lastly, in most cases – especially those involving gathering information from digital, user-driven sources, you’ve got to nail down the verification of that info. While in many ways curation has become easier, it’s also become harder to sift through and find the reliable and factual sources.”

“What are the best tools available right now for content curation and why?

A few of my favorites: Storify.com, for a centralization tool. I use it a lot, for various purposes, and they actually just launched a bunch of major changes yesterday, I’ve played around with them and it’s a great improvement on many levels. In terms of aggregation, I’m a Google Reader person, but I’ve also started playing around with pearltrees.com lately. It’s as if you mind-mapped your RSS feed list. Very neat concept. A few others that stick out are the Zite and Flipboard apps for iPad for content discovery. Depending on what needs you have, blogging platforms like Posterous and Tumblr make it easier for teams to curate and centralize third-party content as well.”

“In your opinion, who is doing content curation right on the web?

In terms of media outlets, I’ve been impressed by BBC and their content curation desk and Al Jazeera, especially with “The Stream” which was launched this spring. I like Clay Shirky’s Thought Leaders channel, and Andy Carvin has led the way in disseminating critical information quickly, but still having a high standard for verification. The Smartbrief industry roundups, of which I’m subscribed to many, are great curated resources. I’ve also come across “Earth Knowledge,” which is a really neat Google Maps mashup.”

“Who is doing it wrong?

People or organizations tend to falter in two areas. In the verification process or when they should be giving proper attribution to the original content creator. These two areas need special attention.”

“What are the boundaries of fair use in content curation in your assessment?

Again, proper attribution of the original content creator is very important. There are many ways to do this on various platforms, and there are generally recognized “best practices” that people use. If you neglect the attribution part of the equation, this is when you get into sticky situations. For instance, when Posterous first came out, several content creators were upset by how little attention Posterous users paid to giving them credit for content… in some cases the “creators” thought the “curators” had downright plagiarized their work. Since then, the community of users has developed a set of practices to support both parties. It pays to take a look at how each platform handles this aspect of curation and make sure you’re dotting your “I”s and crossing your ‘t’s.”

“In your opinion, how much does it matter to the consumer if they’re obtaining information from its original source, as long as that source is credited? Consumers want information, and that means different things to different people. Many consumers are only concerned about the information they receive and being able to process it quickly because they’re reading these sites simply as a way to quickly digest information and move on. Other consumers may want to dig deeper, explore more sources, get to the original source and expand their body of information. And others still may actually NEED to have the original source for verification purposes or if they’re conducting research or writing an article. This depends on what type of consumer you are.”

Have additional thoughts on what it takes to do content curation right? Share them in the comments.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

“A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users,” says software engineer Steven Saviano on the official Google Blog. “Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.”

“Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference,” he adds. “And the best presentations are made together, collaborating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience.”

With the new version, presentations can be created by more than one person simultaneously, and you can see exactly what others are working on with “presence markers”. Teams can edit simultaneously, and there is a revision history feature so you can see who made changes or revert to earlier versions. There is also a built-in chat feature. Are we seeing some Google Wave creep in here?

Google says it’s gradually rolling out the new version of Presentations, but you can use it now if you go to Document Settings, click the editing tab, and check the box next to “Create new presentations using the latest version of the presentation editor.”

Google says you’ll need a “modern browser” if you want to be able to edit with the new version.

Google also says more collaboration features are on the way.

Have you tried out Facebook’s new Page Insights? Let us know.

Webtrends was one of the select companies included in the Alpha testing of this tool and Justin Kistner, its Director of Social Products, talked with us specifically about how brands could use it. According to him, the most significant part of the improved tool was the new focus on engagement.

Kistner believes there are 4 levels of social measurement including obtaining fans, driving engagement, finding a value proposition, and retaining and growing the value. Up to this point, the tool has been focused on the first level of measurement, but the new Page Insights helps the world understand the importance of engagement.

“In the past, brands have all been focusing on how you grow your fans, and now they’re going to focus on how you grow engagement,” said Kistner.

As the image shows, Facebook also introduced a new metric called “People Talking About This” with the new Page Insights. This metric combines all the levels of engagement including likes, comments, shares, as well as video plays, RSVPs for events, and check-ins. The tool takes this data and displays how it performed on a weekly basis, as seen here:

Webtrends also introduced a tool called Hoverstats that works with Facebook Page Insights to help brands understand more about their pages. Hoverstats, specifically, looks at the effectiveness of the posts that brands push out through Facebook. The core feature of this tool is the Post Strength Indicator (PSI), which scores each Facebook post based on the total reach and engagement.

“Giving them a lot of data actually makes it harder to understand, so what we wanted to do was take all of that and boil it down into a single number,” said Kistner. “That way the page admin can know whether or not the post they put out was effective.”

As Kistner went on to explain, marketers need to understand engagement in order to be effective on the Facebook platform. The way engagement works on Facebook is actually similar to how ranking factors work on Google. For instance, when a brand pushes out a post, it doesn’t immediately reach all of the fans. Instead, a brand needs to have engagement in order to break through Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and show up in the News Feed.

“So, what this new data is gonna do and what our new tool helps with that new data is really understand how your posts are driving engagement, and therefore, if you’re getting the reach that you so desire from having that audience,” explained Kistner.

Facebook’s new Page Insights are already available, and Hoverstats is available through a Google Chrome plug-in. Kistner told us that Hoverstats would also be available for other browsers in the near future.

In what ways do you see these free tools helping your marketing efforts on Facebook?

Developer Andrew Shen, for example, has created a browser extension called Search Extension for Google Plus, which searches Google+ public contents and profiles. It includes filters for

• All contents
• Only posts
• Only profiles
• Only posts from Buzz
• Only posts from Google Reader

There is also an Android app for it.

If you don’t want to install anything, you can still use the search engine, as it’s simply available at googleplussearch.chromefans.org. It’s built on Google Custom Search. On the site, it also provides “Hot Trends” from Google+.

Also, don’t forget that Wajam recently started letting users add their Google+ circles to its social search experience. This will allow results from people you’re connected with on Google+ to appear in results as you search Google, Bing, Yahoo and various other sites.

“Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages,” explains engineering manager Ram Ramani. “To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.”

According to Joshua Bixby, who blogs at Web Peformance Today and runs Strangeloop, a site acceleration solutions provider, you may want to think twice about such a tool if you’re running an enterprise level site.

“The offering is geared to small sites with little to no complexity, which is very different from enterprise offerings in the market,” he tells WebProNews. “The new Google product will break pages; enterprise web content optimization systems have many systems that ensure this does not happen.”

“The features are basic and they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to acceleration,” he adds. “It performs a few basic acceleration features, some of which have the capability to slow down pages.”

“The features don’t today address the most important performance challenges faced by the enterprise,” Bixby continues. “It might speed up individual page but not transactions or flows (i.e., it will probably hurt conversion); enterprise WCO companies look across pages and examine user flows to ensure optimal flows instead of pages. Some of the major performance issues facing pages today not solved by the new product include 3rd party tags, consolidation of images, etc.

” It is a very interesting competitive offering to Amazon and some of the small cloud acceleration players like CloudFlare, Blaze, Torbit, and Yotta,” he concludes. “The cloud providers offering basic page based acceleration features targeted at the small- to mid-market will be faced with a formidable competitor.”

Ramani says Google has seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. They offer a tool here, where you can run tests.

Google says it will be adding improvements to the service.

Right now, Page Speed Service is only being offered to a limited set of webmasters for free, but the service won’t be free forever. Google says pricing will be “competitive,” and that details will be made available later. There is an application form here.

Don’t forget, last year, Google announced that site speed is included as a ranking signal in its search algorithms.

The service proved to be accurate and turned into almost a spoiler service for the show. Because it became quite popular, Likester founder and president Kevin McCarthy began thinking about what else he could do with the technology. In the end, he came up with a social media platform called Likester Lists that allows users to track Facebook Likes based on a particular topic on a daily basis for free.

“Likester Lists is a platform that allows you to track the daily Likes that anything in the Facebook universe is receiving,” he said.

In a nutshell, the platform is an ongoing poll that calculates new data daily. There are other services that provide a similar service, but many of these charge for their data. Anyone can create a List, and once you do, Likester creates a dashboard that organizes all your Lists with images, links, and more.

For example, one List that already exists is “Who’s Winning the Shoe Wars?” Although some people might speculate that Nike receives the most Likes, it does not. It does bring in a few thousand Likes each day, but Converse brings in 20,000 Likes on average daily.

“What’s popular on a Net basis in the Facebook universe is not necessarily what’s popular on an ongoing basis,” said McCarthy.

Because Facebook’s Like data has grown to be tremendously valuable, McCarthy believes that Likester Lists will be beneficial to both general “for fun” users as well as professional users. He also sees the platform being extremely useful in the upcoming election season.

“In 6 months, I would bet that the political world is going to realize what Likester is onto here,” he said.

Likester has plans to create animated heatmaps that show the likes for each candidate in blue and red. This service is likely to really influence the election season because, as McCarthy pointed out, polls have a lot of flaws in them, but a Like analysis is purely data driven.

Could you see Likester shaking up the political scene during the upcoming elections? Let us know.

It lets you reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (ie: iPhones and iPads).

You may recall a similar tool from Adobe, called Wallaby. Here’s what Google has to say about that:

Wallaby is an installable tool that converts .fla files, whereas Swiffy is a web-based tool that converts .swf files. Wallaby focuses on reusing parts of a Flash file in HTML, and thus produces code that can be edited by the developer, whereas Swiffy generates an efficient format that is not that easily editable.

Adobe is pleased to see the Flash platform extended to devices which don’t support the Flash player. The result is that anyone creating rich or interactive ads can continue to get all the authoring benefits of Flash Pro and have the flexibility to run the ad in the Flash Player or HTML depending on what’s available on the system. Google and Adobe look forward to close collaboration around efforts like these.

Google has provided a Swiffy gallery showing side-by-side original Flash animations and their Swiffy conversion counterparts here.

To use Swiffy’s output on your own site, you can simply save the HTML file that is generated, and include it on your site using an iframe tag. You can preview the output on a mobile device as well.

Google says Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari.

Google says it is not sure whether or not Swiffy will be open source.

Do you believe that brands are pushing too much noisy content? Let us know.

Although there are many tools and tactics for cutting through the noise, Prosodic, a new startup based in Seattle, recently launched with the goal of helping enterprises with this predicament. The tool is a predictive intelligence platform for brands that need to manage and analyze social media content.

Leigh Fatzinger, the company’s CEO, told WebProNews that he realized the need for a platform like Prosodic through his work at social media agency Nology Media. As he explained, Nology Media published thousands of Facebook posts for its clients, which made it difficult to manage. He also found that other community managers had this same problem, which is how Prosodic began.

“Prosodic really is the result of analyzing this space of content and interactions and finding out how you can create… a workflow of an algorithm that helps enterprises make better publishing decisions based on all the content that they’ve published previously,” said Fatzinger.

“It’s really based on the premise that there are no averages in social media. When a brand should publish and how much they should publish, and what they should publish is dictated by their audience alone… that’s the problem that Prosodic solves.”

One of the biggest advantages of Prosodic is that it has the ability to predict how the content will perform before it is published. It does this by looking at the brand’s past publishing habits and how the audience interacts with the content based on areas such as comments, @replies on Twitter, and “Likes” on Facebook. The tool also analyzes the audience’s reaction to the time of day the content was pushed out and the type of content whether it be text, video, images, etc. From this information, the algorithm reports a potential outcome.

Prosodic, additionally, has a permission feature that allows brands to approve content before it is published. Many brands are fearful of social media disasters especially after Marc Jacobs and Chrysler’s Twitter incidents.

“We don’t want to stifle creativity or slow anything down,” said Fatzinger. “We just want to give enterprises the ability to create a set of rules and standards and then let them develop the processes themselves.”

He also pointed out that Prosodic was “complimentary” to social monitoring tools such as Radian6 and not a competitor.