Earlier this year, the Pew Internet & American Life Research Project released a study showing that teens aged 12 to 17 and young adults aged 18 to 29 (the latter often classified as Millenials) are the biggest Internet-using demographics. Of those two groups, the younger one favors social networking over just about anything else, including blogging.

Remembering also the Kaiser Foundation survey, which claimed that many teens spend upwards of seven hours a day consuming digital media, we’ve got a strong picture of the human race’s fully connected and massively social digital future.

Whereas those two surveys portrayed young people mostly as media consumers and social networkers (the Pew report found that kids don’t blog or tweet as much as their immediate elders), a new study released on eMarketer suggests that Millenials, at least, are huge readers and creators of blog content.

Researched by BlogHer and iVillage and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company, the study found that 40.4% of the 18-to-29-year-olds surveyed write blogs — that’s two fifths of all blog writers in the study.

The most popular blog subjects were “Express myself” and “For fun.” The least popular: “Earn money” and “Persuade others,” though a fifth or more do blog for those purposes.

But what about the kids?

As ReadWriteWeb points out, the survey left out teens under 18 — the so-called “iGeneration,” that’s so hooked right now on social networking sites, especially Facebook.

The Pew survey showed that a majority — 62% to 80% — of 12-to-17-year-olds engage in social networking. And you know who gets this? Facebook.

The world’s largest social network has been blowing up headlines the past week with its overtures about making the Internet more social through things like its “Like button for the Internet.”

They may or may not create as much of their own content (both macro- and micro-blogging), but kids definitely share content and interact with each other in increasing numbers the social web.

And if there’s one thing we’re learning, the future of online consumption is definitely becoming more social.

Put that in your pipe … and share it.

Can an organization effectively “join the social media revolution” without using Facebook and Twitter?

The Kansas City Area Development Council thinks so.

The KCADC promotes the Kansas City region to businesses and investors looking at new markets. According to its site, to date, the KCADC has attracted more than 500 companies to the region.

The local nonprofit has decided to start leveraging social media to accomplish its goals. However, as a post by PR person Ashlie Hand to the brand-new KC Think Blog explains, the group will be using some social platforms and avoiding others.

After writing about how she consulted online communities at Babycenter.com in raising her kids, Hand explains that the KCADC surveyed investors and about “100 site location consultant contacts” to find out how they are using social media.

They concluded that in order to build a social media campaign focused on investors only, the KCADC would use LinkedIn, a branded YouTube channel and a weekly blog. “Since few of our KCADC investors are using Twitter or Facebook for business relationships and networking, as popular and useful as they are for some, we’re not going to waste our time there,” Hand writes.

At a time when companies are racing to set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to connect with their communities, doesn’t that declaration sound strange … perhaps a bit reactionary?

Looking at the organization’s list of overall goals, we can imagine ways the KCADC could use Facebook and Twitter to do things like “enhance awareness of our metro’s assets to create positive perceptions”and to “promote the region as the business location of choice.” I, for one, would be happy to follow a group like KCADC on Twitter, but I guess I won’t get to.

By refusing to take part in the conversation on the biggest social platforms, is KCADC missing opportunities to build community and attract new business?

Then again, KCADC did do its research. Far too many companies have rushed into the social networking fray without a clear plan — other than, in some nightmare cases, “Let the intern handle it.” The KCADC took a close look at its community and business goals before deciding which social platforms to use.

What do you think? Is the KCADC being clueless or appropriately selective? Do you like its investors-only approach to social networking? Should it be more open to connecting with regular people?

And thought they won’t find out about this post via Facebook or Twitter, maybe we’ll get some KCADC people to weigh in, too.

As more and more teens and young adults get online (we’re close to 100 percent, folks), usage habits are changing, with content creation in the form of blogging falling among both age groups and social networking activity increasing.

Or so it would seem based on a new survey on Social Media and Young Adults conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Teens and young adults (followed closely behind by us still-remember-the-typewriter Gen X-ers) are the biggest Internet users. Survey says: “Nearly two-thirds of teen internet users (63%) go online every day – 36% of teens go online several times a day and 27% go online about once a day.”

Going Mobile: Of the 75 percent of kids 12-18 who own cell phones, 66 percent text. 79 percent own an MP3 player. (And it looks like 72 percent of adults aged 50-64 still listen to the radio and buy CDs. Ha … ha.)

Taken with the Kaiser Foundation survey we reported on earlier this month, which showed that kids spend upwards of seven hours a day consuming digital media, this all paints a fairly definitive picture of neither trend nor fad but … dare we say it … human evolution?

At the forefront is social media. The Pew report shows that of the teens who go online daily, 80 percent visit social networking sites (SNS). 62 percent of teens who go online less often still visit social networks. The Pew survey suggests that social networking may even provide incentives for teens to go online.

Twitter, on the other hand, is not popular at all with teens — only 8 percent use the microblogging service. The decline in original content creation extends to blogging and to commenting on blogs. Both of those activities have declined among teens and young adults.

Interestingly, however, blogging has increased among older adults, due, no doubt, to the rise of blogging as a business tool. In the past, blogs were the primary means of personal self-expression and sharing web content. Now Facebook and Twitter (for young adults, at least) make self-broadcasting more effortless.

It seems, though, that kids are more interested in private transactions (the almighty text) than in public display. After all, when you’re in eighth grade, the here-and-now of cafeteria seating drama and locker gossip is way more relevant than whatever’s going on in the adult, *gulp*, world of public commentary.

Just about every business owner in the universe right now knows that using social media to attract and communicate with customers is essential. For proof, see this and this.

But for businesses that have yet to establish an active presence on social media (and there are still many), coming up with worthwhile content for all those blog plosts, tweets, status updates, videos, podcasts and so forth amounts to a pretty daunting task.

Quality and quantity are key in an effective social media strategy. The messages must be useful and engaging, or people won’t make the jump from following you online to becoming paying customers. The messages must be frequent and consistent, or people won’t keep coming back.

I won’t lie. It’s a lot of work.

So how do you inject value into that stream of content gushing from your keyboard?

The mistake so many businesses make is to hire an intern or appoint an already overworked employee to feed out one-sided sales information. Think of a car dealership that opens a Twitter account and begins tweeting the make, model and price of every car on the lot. Or a restaurant that does nothing but regurgitate its lunch specials day after day.

Worst of all are the businesses that do nothing but repeat the same old, tired call for you to come in and buy stuff. The only thing those businesses are likely to get their customers to do is unfriend them.

It’s social media — not commercial media. People do not want to be told what to do.

So how on earth does a company owner turn the content grind into gold?

The process of creating worthwhile content has two main parts.

1. Listen. Before you can get people talking about your brand, you’ve got to tune into the larger conversation. Plug keywords related to your vertical market into Twitter search and see what’s being said in real-time. Place an ear to the blogosphere through Technorati and Google’s blog search. See if anyone’s built a social network related to your field on Ning. Find experts in your industry on LinkedIn. Just plain Google the hell out of everything.

Whether you deal in semiconductors or hairbrushes, people are talking about your area of expertise online. But before you begin even thinking of talking up your brand, figure out how you can add to the conversation without coming on like that guy — i.e., the one who has nothing of value to add other than “hey, look at me!”

And that brings us to…

2. Create Value. Now, the fun part! Once you’ve gotten a feel for how discussion of your product or vertical is carried out online by experts and amateurs alike, it’s time for you to start throwing in your two cents.

Realize that the real power of social media is in allowing you to tell your own story to the world however you want through your own channel.

If you’re a business owner, then you’re an expert in something. You have information and insights that people can benefit from.

Say you’re a restaurant owner looking to promote your business through a blog. Rather than using that blog as an extended advertising platform or personal diary, cram it with your thoughts on things like food preparation, culinary trends, running a business, managing a waitstaff, dealing with difficult customers, the art of pairing wines with dishes, your thoughts on decor, how sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon affect business … there’s really no shortage of interesting things to talk about. Share your specialized knowledge.

If you’re not much of a writer but still want to produce the content yourself, set up a cheap video camera and record yourself dispensing wisdom. Gary Vaynerchuk used video blogging to turn his site, Winelibrary.com (which was actually an offshoot of his family’s liquor store) into a lucrative online retailer.

Your homework: Come up with 25 ideas for blog posts related to your field of interest to your audience.

Why do this? Because “brand” is no longer just a logo, a company and a product. The rise of social media has deepened and diversified what it means to be a brand. A brand is a story. It has a voice and personality. And now you can create your own channel for sharing that story, that voice, and interacting with other stories and voices online.

If you create worthwhile content, people will consume it and share it with their friends.

Then the next time they or someone they know needs a semiconductor or a hairbrush, guess whose name comes up in conversation?

Good news for all us long-winded souls: Twitter (or, to use its generic designation, “microblogging”) has not killed regular blogging as was previously predicted in Dewey-Defeats-Truman fashion.

TechCrunch reports that while Twitter is flattening out at around 58.3 million users, blogging sites such as Google’s massive Blogger (291.7 million) and WordPress (which we use — 151.8 million) have actually seen growth over the past month.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg weighs in on TechCrunch’s findings with a blog post of his own, asserting that micro-blogging is complementary to blogging:

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

Followers of @lockerpartner have noticed that we do this very thing. When a blog post goes up, a tweet goes out. Granted, no one wants to follow a Twitter account that serves as nothing more than an RSS feed for blog posts, but, simply put, bloggers can’t afford not to send out alerts on Twitter. If your friends are Twitter purists, they don’t have to follow. Most people, I’ve found, appreciate getting updates to their friends’ blogs on Twitter; otherwise, they wouldn’t see it.

But the big question is, is the world tired of tweeting? Once Twitter rolls out its geolocation API, it could see some much-needed growth. But the fact remains that while Twitter is an eminently useful tool, it’s hard to build a brand when you’re limited to 140-character bursts. With a blog, you can make your message loud and clear.

On a side note, I was wondering why these writers didn’t refer to the converse of microblogging as “macroblogging.” (Mullenweg chooses to call it “megablogging.”) I did some searching, though, and found that macroblogging was adopted by Woofer, a living parody of Twitter that looks and works like Twitter, except that users are allowed 1400 characters for their posts. It’s a funny, possibly even compelling concept, but for whatever reason, it never caught on. And now its creators have moved on to “omniblogging” with the mega-unpopular (145 users!?) RantRoll.

Yep, looks like regular old blogging isn’t going anywhere.

With his book, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, having recently been named a Top 10 book of the year by Amazon, Chris Brogan is social-media marketing’s man of the hour.

And if you spend even a little time on his blog, it’s easy to see why. First of all, even though Brogan is president of a hot-shot marketing company, he is directly engaged with his audience, building relationships with his blog readers at the same time as he builds his brand — these two activities being, of course, mutually inclusive in social media land, whether you’re mom or a pop or a millionaire CEO.

Brogan is both wise and warm. Human is the word you’ll hear in conversations about the guy, such as this one, in which he’s compared to another social media expert, Gary Vaynerchuk, who is definitely engaging but a bit more over-the-top. (If the two geniuses were cast in a production of Dumb and Dumber, Vaynerchuk would be Jim Carrey; Brogan, Jeff Daniels.)

If you’re someone who’s still trying to figure out how to make blogging, new media, social networking, and so forth, work for your brand (read: everyone), Brogan is a guiding light, dishing out practical advice without bombarding you with jargon. His archived post from well over a year ago, Basic Business Blogging Suggestions, is one of the best primers we’ve run across in a while on getting started blogging. (Even though we’ve been at this a while, we always like returning to the basics, especially when guided there by really smart people.)

See that first point, “Above All Else, Be Human”? There’s that h-word again. Many business types don’t think it’s appropriate to show a human side when participating in online-based marketing. Being open about your life and yourself on social media compromises your privacy, right? Leaves you open for attack?

Come on. What are you afraid of?

Fact is, potential customers, clients, partners, employees — anyone who might end up working with you in any capacity — want to know what you’re like as a person. From his blog, to his Flickr (from which the above image was cribbed) to his tellingly @reply-ridden Twitter, Brogan has used the transparency (there’s that word again) factor of social media to present himself to the world as a guy you would like to have in your corner.

And that requires a certain fearlessness.