A survey of more than 15,200 shoppers has turned up some interesting insight into how consumers share information that they've discovered online. The data, released by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA) looked at the most common ways that people spread the word about interesting products. It also looked at what types of offline channels were most likely to send people online for further research.

Here's how the data breaks down.

After searching, consumers are mostly likely to communicate with others about their find in the following ways:

Face to face communications - 68.9%
Sending e-mails - 53.1%
By telephone - 50.9%
By cell phone - 30%

When they narrowed the field to young adults (18-24), they found that that group also communicated via:

Instant Message - 37.5%
Text messages - 23.7%
Online communities - 20.6%

The process flows the other way as well. The survey does a great job of reinforcing the fact that traditional forms of media often send people online in order to find more information about a product or service. In fact, 92.5% of adults go online "regularly or occasionally" in order to do more research before making a purchase. What drives these people online? Well, you might be surprised...

Magazine ads - 47.2%
Reading articles - 43.7%
Newspapers - 42.3%
Television - 42.8%

Just goes to show that as much as some people want to say that traditional advertising is dead, it's essential to realize that it's not dead, it's just not the only game in town any more. The companies that learn how to seamlessly mesh their online and offline marketing so that they can capture people's attention and feed their need for more data will be the ones that come out ahead.