Thanks to the folks at the Twitter Power System Blog, I found some cool new ways to search for Twitter users using my favorite search engine, Google.

Check out their guide here.

I’m conducting a poll on LinkedIn.

I’d like to hear from my blog readers and LinkedIn users how much they use social media for business.

If you’d like to participate, click here.

We all know Google has something like 75 percent of the online search market.

When compiling data by doing online research, it doesn’t hurt to try more than one search engine. In fact, it would be helpful.

I like what I see with the Zuula search engine. Read what the company has to say about their product on their About Zuula page, then give it a test drive. Why not?

There’s a new tool in social media town. It’s aptly named Spy.

Guess what it does?

It listens in on social media conversations and tells you what people are saying.

It’s a Google App that draws data from Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Yahoo News, Google Reader and RSS feeds (like from your Web site, blog or online newsroom).

So, if you need to know what’s being said about your company, people or products, just logon to Spy and take it for a drive.

What will they think of next? A secret video camera that records your every thought and action? Scary!

I’ve got a backlog of blog post ideas and most of them have to do with useful tools for public relations practitioners. This research tool is no exception.

I was introduced to this resource by HARO (see my earlier post).

Scherer Cybrarian Services provides information, data and statistics. They maintain a very helpful research blog and have “well over 60 years of combined business and research experience” in virtually every industry.

If you’re working on a communications plan or developing a specific campaign for a key constituency, your first stop is, or at least should be, research. Perhaps Scherer Cybrarian can be a helpful resource for you.