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.

What that means for the service's end users is that you have the ability to parse Twitter analytics in a number of different ways. When you do a keyword search, Research.ly can identify the people talking about that word or phrase, and then you can drill down into the "Interest Graph" to splice the data even further by gender, sentiment, etc. or find related word clouds, hashtags, links, @names and more. It can even pull up related media, like photos from Twitpic or YouTube videos.

In addition, Research.ly has grouped Twitter users into various demographics (think "moms," "CEOs," "engineers," etc.), which means users can now direct the service to return very precise answers to your queries. For example, you could discover things like Mommy bloggers in San Francisco tweeting about human rights or all the good things said about Coke and bad things said about Pepsi.

Account owners, who are presumably accessing the service using a business or brand's Twitter account, can even drill down to see the degrees of separation between themselves and a particular user and how they are connected.

Research.ly's pricing will be $99 per seat per month or $499 per seat per month for its premium features. We've been given an account to try but have had access to it for just a day, so we can't make a final recommendation or endorsement as to its capabilities, but we're definitely excited about the potential.

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.

The Salesmen, Connectors and Mavens are the three key influencer roles in today's social networks, just as they are offline. Salesmen, as you may guess, are defined by their ability to persuade people to purchase or act in certain ways. Salesmen aren't commercial entities, though; they just have the ability to encourage others to action.

Connectors can be split into two sub-groups - "Heavy" and "Light," and are defined by their status as a bridging function between disparate groups of people. Connectors have contacts in a multitude of different social groups and enjoy introducing people to one another.

Mavens are essentially information brokers. They are experts in a particular area and typically field questions from friends and family in need of advice. Often this advice influences purchasing decisions. Mavens, however, aren't necessarily trying to persuade people to purchase; they're just informing them.

Targeting the Key Influencers is Critical

These three roles play part in the purchasing activities of 74% of the population, says Gartner. The survey, taking place in the fourth quarter of 2009, studied nearly 4,000 consumers in 10 key markets and identified six different roles of user behavior. In addition to those mentioned above, there are also Seekers, who are the ones asking others for information, the Self-sufficient, who prefer to find the answers themselves and the Unclassified, who didn't fit into any defined role.

Gartner said it expected that some wouldn't easily fit into these prescribed roles because they may take on different roles when in different social contexts. You may be heralded as the IT expert (aka Maven) among your family, for example, but among your IT colleagues you're more of a Seeker of information. Two-thirds of the population ended up as Unclassified, however, which makes this report's findings and the staggering percentages regarding influence somewhat moot .

What marketers can take away from the study is that there are specific personality types that can be (and should be) targeted when using social networks to promote a brand, company, product or service. Salesmen, Seekers and Connectors are the most effective social network segments to target. This can be done by focusing on both the shopping experience and making information easily available to them. Mavens aren't as useful, because they don't do anything with the information they know unless specifically asked. For these folks (as well as the Self-sufficients), the focus should be primarily on improving the shopping experience.

At the end of the day, none of this is really new information - it just reinforces the fact that when online, consumers behave pretty much as they did prior to the Internet age. Word-of-mouth is still the best way to attract new business, and businesses should target those who like to influence others.

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.

Apparently this feature has been in the works for some time, at least according to the timestamp on the Google Help explanation about "enhanced content," which shows its last update was in July of this year. The explanation reads:

If you're subscribed to receive email from certain senders, the messages you receive from them will be enhanced with an interactive gadget that has up-to-date content from their website (you'll also see an icon in your inbox identifying these messages).

For example, if you receive a Pregnancy Bulletin newsletter from Babycenter, you'll be able to view up-to-date content, including the baby name of the day, and browse though the current top 100 baby names within the message. Aside from the convenience of being able to interact with certain websites from inside Gmail, the branded content will help identify that your messages are legitimate and not spoofed (we'll only show branded content when the sender authenticates their mail). We're currently testing this with a small number of senders and will decide whether to make it widely available based on user and partner feedback.

A Marketer's Dream

Real-time content updates within Gmail messages sound like a great idea as long as it doesn't slow down the loading of the message, replying, forwarding and the like. Just imagine the possibilities! In the enhanced Netflix emails, for example, you not only view your recent recommendations - you can actually add them to your queue right from within the message itself.

This sort of interactivity is sure to be an email marketer's dream as it allows for whole new levels of user engagement with the brand. Instead of simply dismissing the email with a click of the "delete" button, recipients might find themselves actually taking the time to read through what were once thought of as "throwaway" messages. In this information-overloaded era where out-of-control inboxes have many email users declaring email bankruptcy, doing mass deletes, and filtering all non-personal email to other folders, any extra incentive to not delete or ignore an email is a feature which marketers are sure to take notice of.

But a little in-email interactivity may only be scratching the surface of what this enhanced content makes possible. What could come next? Perhaps you'll soon be able to make purchases without ever leaving the confines of your inbox? As McGee writes in his post - wait until Amazon gets on board with that idea - our wallets are sure to take a beating!

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.

Better Analytics for Facebook Shares

Today, in addition to seeing the views, reach, and re-shares for links shared on Twitter and Facebook, Sharein is now capturing data on Facebook "likes" and comments. In fact, it's even pulling in the comments' text itself so you can use the service as a one-stop shop for tracking the popularity of items on Facebook.

And as before, the aggregate data tracked using the service is further analyzed on your main "Shares" page where you can see the most popular links for the past week, month, or year. You'll also be able to tell who your most popular sharers are so you can better engage with your core fans or customers.

New Features Help Increase Click-Throughs on Facebook

The way your shared links appear on Facebook has also been revamped as of today. Sharein is (at last!) generating a thumbnail to accompany an article, just like how Facebook's own tool displays native link shares. The shares now also feature data on the number of tweets courtesy of Tweetmeme and the number of diggs on the social news website Digg.com. This extra information can help generate more interest in the shared link as visitors will be able to see at a glance how popular the article is on other social networks.

For video shares, extra information has been added here, too. When sharing YouTube videos, the ratings info and total views are now displayed. Again, this is to help increase click-throughs by highlighting the popularity of the content.

Try it Now!

With all the features being offered by this tool, we're surprised that more people aren't talking about or using the service. However, Sharein is still so new that few may have heard of it yet. We're sure that once Facebook and Twitter marketers, businesses, and any others who want to track their shares on social networks get wind of what Sharein can do, its popularity will increase dramatically. If you haven't tried Sharein yet, you can set up an account today from the company home page.

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.

We're not sure where anyone, marketer or not, gets off telling Twitter that it's their responsibility to filter the content that flows through their service mainly because Twitter is already doing so. The company itself currently addresses the spam issue by providing an @spam account where you can report spammers and other abusers in the Twittersphere. If the account in question is indeed a spammer, Twitter boots them from the service. That sounds good to us. Simple and effective...at least for the end user. (It's probably a nightmare to deal with at Twitter HQ).

Of course, Twitter doesn't want their service overrun by spammers - no one would. However, they're probably more concerned with wasting their resources to support these fake accounts than they are with the annoyance it causes for their users. But do they have it under control? Perhaps not - fighting spam is sort of like fighting computer viruses. You block one and someone makes a new one. The same goes for spammers - kill one spammer and another appears to take his place. It's an ongoing fight, not a plague that can be wiped out overnight through some magic filter.

Besides, what you consider spam, I may consider "valuable information about a product." Probably not, but there is a gray area there that has to be taken into consideration. Some spam is out-and-out spam, but other stuff may just be "hot deals" from a legitimate company. However, if you didn't want to see said hot deals, you might consider them spam. Still, how would you see them unless you actually followed that account to begin with? Or maybe you turned on auto-follow using a service like SocialToo? If that's the case, it's a little ridiculous for you to get annoyed when half your timeline turns into a slew of "buy this" messages - you only have yourself to blame for that.

Where Actual Spam Hurts Us

The only place that honest-to-goodness spam can really affect you on an everyday basis is not in your own personal timeline of friends' tweets, but when viewing a trending topic's stream or when doing a keyword search. In these cases, spammers hijacking a currently popular hashtag may show up in the timeline, potentially diluting the results with irrelevant information. For this reason alone, we support Twitter's spam-fighting efforts.

Even More Dangerous? "Tweet to Win"

What's actually more concerning than spam, however, is the new trend we'll call "tweet to win." Legitimate companies have begun using Twitter to promote a message - essentially an advertisement about their business' offerings. To cajole twitizens into "spamming" their followers in this way, they're offering prizes or the chance to win prizes in return. (Full disclosure: this author did this once and still regrets it).

This situation hasn't gotten out of hand just yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before it does. Because really, how many of you could resist yourselves if all of a sudden a company started giving away free Macbook Pros? Oh, apparently not too many of you because you've already spammed up trending topics today with #moonfruit. What's Moonfruit? Why, it's a company that's giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 10 days. Is this a brilliant social media promotion (as Adam Ostrow of Mashable claims) or just a new, inventive way to junk up the twitterstream with advertisements? We think it's closer to the latter.

The only consolation in this particular case is that Moonfruit doesn't care what your tweet says, so it can just be appended to any ordinary tweet. That's not usually the case - most companies provide a message for you to re-tweet.

What's frightening about this "it's not spam, it's a message from your friend" is that it's really not. My friend isn't actually telling me that Moonfruit is this great new company they have just heard about and that I really have to check out. This isn't a word-of-mouth recommendation - my friend just wants to win a new laptop. They know this, I know this, and the company knows this. And that makes the message just as spammy to me as any other in-stream tweet from an actual spammer.

So, what can be done? Well sure, I could unfollow that so-called friend, but why would I? It's not like they do this regularly and 99% of the time, I like what they have to say. But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be tweeting to win something else. Even if only a small percentage of an ever-shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it would be enough to junk up my timeline.

Sadly, that's one kind of spam that Twitter can't really block. And neither can I.