If Facebook had been around in 1977 that is.

According to research from Askmen.com, if you’re a male in your forties, there’s a 19% chance you’re using it to communicate with your male buddies – from down in the jungle room perhaps.

However, they’d far rather you picked up the leopard skin trim phone and gave them a call – for 37% that’s their preferred method of keeping in touch.

As a back up, you could send an email – 28% are down with that. Just don’t bother trying to organising group beers by Twitter – only 15% will see the invite.

No doubt this age demographic translates to working life too, suggesting that an email/phone call combination is your best chance of maintaining a business relationship at 40+ whereas text & Facebook will be priority channels for marketers trying to find ways of tapping into the 18 to 24 age group.

For the over 50’s, forget anything other than a call phone or email basically – which will come as no surprise to most adult males communicating with their father.

Indeed it’s preferable Dads don’t stray on to Facebook, though worryingly an increasing number are – 9.1%. This is SO embarrassing, even for those in their late Elvis years.

Source: emarketer.

According to a post on Junta 42’s blog today, 55% of marketers are outsourcing at least some part of their content marketing.

A full report is to follow but the sneak preview further shows that companies with 1000+ employees are 60% more likely to outsource content marketing than micro companies (less than 5 employees).

While understandable, the post suggests that all companies should be outsourcing part of their content marketing for the following reasons:

1) Someone out there will have better ideas than you do.

2) You don’t have time to do everything.

3) You will not be as focussed as your appointed content marketing agency would be.

The most successful recent brand video virals have been humour driven – Heineken, Old Spice, which makes Dove’s top 5 viral unusual, as it makes a serious point about billboard model images to promote Dove’s ‘campaign for real beauty’. It also manages to achieve that difficult social thing of not appearing ‘fake’ in anyway. 11.5 million views to date. There’s no embed code so click to watch here

While Lady Gaga passed Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher to become the most followed Twitterer ever (like OMG) with  5.7 million followers this week, Roger Federer’s tennis trick viral for Gillette is the most shared video on Twitter (and on all social media), according to the Viral Video Chart. Nothing fake about his talent, though the staging may raise an eyebrow or two?

YouTube has launched a new function that allows viewers to see what are the most viewed/liked/subscribed videos this week/month and all time. YouTube Charts also happily alerted us to this surreal bovine dance from Brighton based freelance animator- Cyriak, which is number one this week with 4 million+ views.

While growth of social media use by consumers has outstripped blogging in recent years, in the corporate world, it’s a different story, with the corporate blogging showing strong growth, according to a report in Emarketer.

“Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not,” says eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Emarketer estimates that in 2010 one in three companies are using a public-facing blog for marketing purposes, forecasting a rise to 43% by 2012.

“Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service,” said Verna.

There’s also evidence that smaller companies are faster adopters of corporate blogs than large companies.

The fastest rising video on the UK Viral Video Chart this week is this simple but very funny ad from Heineken, 15+ million views on YouTube, 200K share on Facebook – and it’s not even in English.

If you’re a brand about to launch a Twitter account, one of the first issues you face is what does it look like and who is going to run it? Do you go for the anonymous brand approach, which isn’t as good as having a real person, or appoint one of your employees to front it? If you choose the latter route, who do you appoint and what happens when they leave in 2 years time?

Well some brightspark at MTV has come up with the solution to all these conundrums, with a big wad of publicity attached too. They ran a nationwide campaign to find an MTV ‘Twitter Jockey’ – a representative of the station who will serve as their brand ambassador on Twitter for as long as the DJ style contract lasts.

The winner, trailing a load of publicity in her wake, is Gabi Gregg AKA @MTVTj. The 23 year old fought off other contestants in a apprentice style competition which included organising a ‘Tweet-Up’.

While not every brand will have the $100,000 prize budget to attract a ‘Twitter Jockey’ in such a high profile way – the principal could be applied across any organisation prepared to invest in the channel.

A car insurance company GEICO has leapt to the top of the Viral Video Chart this week with 18K shares and 1.3 million views on YouTube. A clever but simple creative idea, very well executed.