That’s according to the Pew Internet & American Life project, which looked at generational differences online.    Apparently, Internet surfers aged 33-72 are ‘significantly’ more likely to check out religious and official Govt info online.

On a more serious note, the study does show that, despite the increased uptake of social networks by older online consumers, they by and large still have a more focused attitude to the Internet.   They go there for a specific task, to find out information, check finances, read the news and so on.

More specifically us generation-Xers (33-44) are still the Kings of online shopping with 80% buying stuff online compared to 71% of generation Y (18-32) and only 38% of teens.

By comparison, as you’d expect digital natives (aged under 30) are more likely to use personal blogs, send instant messages and check out online videos and games.   In other words, the generational divide is a functional versus social one.

Another study, from iStrategy labs, looks specifically at Facebook.   The 35-54 year old one is the fastest growing demographic, while the number of 25-34 year olds doubles every six months.

Image – Tom Coates

A study that shows the limits of social media in helping people discover new content – but also shows the importance of online editorial endorsement  – comes from Knowledge Networks in the US (via Digital Media) .

Viewers were asked how they discover new content and how they decide what to watch, both for TV and online video.   For online video, social media from strangers ranked seventh in terms of recommendations, with verbal word of mouth (41%) and search (32%) coming top.

In other words, even on the Internet people are most likely to be directed to stuff that someone’s told them about face to face.

For regular TV, TV advertising is actually the prime source of content discovery at 46% – who said commercials were dead!  However, social media from strangers only scored 6%.   Meanwhile, just as they are for online videos, verbal recommendations are key in helping people find out about offline TV shows (38%)

Conclusions: Concentrate on online PR, and a search + social media strategy
So is the conclusion that a social media and online engagement strategy is largely a waste of time, and you might as well put your cash into both TV and search ads?  Hardly.

First of all, it’s obvious that even if someone tells you about a great new viral face to face they must have heard or read about it somewhere else.   As always off and online word of mouth have to very much work in tandem.

Secondly, stories or reviews on the Internet ranked highly (27%) in terms of helping people find out about new online videos.   In other words just as you would offline, editorial endorsement online from major blogs and news sources (the lines between the two are blurred anyway) works.

Finally, the Knowledge Networks study shows the effectiveness of search when it comes to helping people discover online video.

However if your social media and search strategy works together then search ends up being even more effective.   That’s shown by an earlier Comscore study that said that people exposed to both what they called “influenced social” and paid search had 233% heavier search behaviour.

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Research firm Sysosmos (the people who recently published stats on Twitter ‘power users’) has come out with a study on online video.

However, rather than recycling the old line about how much online video is growing, Syomos looked at the extent to which bloggers use online video.   That’s obviously important for the simple reason that if your viral is going to go anywhere, bloggers will have a great deal to do with it.

Not surprisingly, You Tube leads in terms of bloggers embedding videos into their blogs, with 84% using it.   However, Vimeo is ahead of Daily Motion and Metacafe in second place with 8% of embeds.   Vimeo (which we ourselves use) positions itself as a higher quality (in both senses of the word) video sharing channel and certainly among online influencers it does better than it does among the mass of consumers.

The best days to embed videos?  Tuesdays and Wednesdays.   This ties back to the fact that a lot of bloggers (present company included) will do more during the working week, and also attract more blog traffic, and much less during weekends.   And again, not surprisingly, lunchtimes are peak online video times for blogs.

The US obviously leads in terms of bloggers using online video (32%), though Brazil (6.6%) beats the UK (4,4%) into second place.   Purely anecdotally, I know that a lot of our campaigns have – randomly – been picked up by Brazilian sites without any rhyme or reason why that should be the case.

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The other day I posted about what marketing agencies see as a measure of viral video success. Unbelievably over a quarter peg the success rate at a million views or more, which to me seems like a case of taking the big number and plucking it out of thin air.

Why? Because getting up to 50k is an achievement given the thousands of brand films that languish on YouTube with several hundred views.

As new research from TubeMogul shows, even though video sharing sites host the actual films, less than half (45%) of us now discover content by browsing through these sites. Which could be why ‘featured’ clips on YouTube used to get 500,000 views, but now often don’t reach 100,000.

Where does the other 55% come from?

Search engines: 11.18%,
Social networks: 3.66%,
Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%,
Video search engines: 0.63%,
Email/IM: 0.05%

“Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic.”

In other words, forget about seeding your video on specialist video search engines, or hoping people will forward it on by email. Blogs and online media are the key to success. Or, according to TubeMogul:

”These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views.

”To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.”

Image – Kimba