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There's a new tool that online marketers, brand managers and social media experts should be aware of: Research.ly, a new social search platform for researching Twitter conversations and tracking the associated analytics. But this is not your average Twitter analytics tool.

Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr's proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter's full feed, a data stream often referred to as the "Twitter firehose." Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more.

Marketers take note: a new study from research firm Gartner has discovered that a majority of today's consumers rely to some extent on social networks to help guide them in purchase decisions. Despite this fact, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, while critical, are currently an underutilized aspect to the marketing process, the report says.

But not everyone using social networks is worth targeting equally, as it turns out. Instead, there are three types of online personalities that make up just one-fifth of the consumer population but are the key influencers in the purchasing activities of 74% of the population. Gartner calls them Salesmen, Connectors and Mavens.

Gmail user Dan McGee writes that he's found a new feature in his Gmail that places small favicons next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons have appeared next to emails sent from commercial services like Netflix and make those messages stand out when users quickly scan a crowded inbox.

This new feature is not just a simple productivity enhancement or advertisement. The icons are there to indicate which messages include "enhanced content" - real-time updates within the body of the email messages, from companies sending the emails.

Sharein, the new bookmarklet-based service for link sharing, which launched earlier this summer, has just today introduced some new features which further solidify this up-and-comer as the new must-have tool for sharing links on the web. The service, already an easy way to share to Twitter, Facebook, and via email, is most notable for its ability to track statistics like views on the back end, a feature that should appeal to marketers looking for hard data on their social media efforts.

Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensable.

Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.

Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.