Don’t take this the wrong way. But are you a native or an immigrant?

We’re not talking about U.S. citizenship, but about your relationship to technology. Enquiro, using terms coined by writer Marc Prensky, defines people as either digital natives or digital immigrants.

Natives, those under 30, grew up with the technology. Immigrants adapted it as adults. So they relate to it in different ways, Enquiro says in a white paper titled, “Digital Natives and B2B Buying.”

Take media usage at work. Natives, as you might expect, spend more time on Web sites and social networks than their older counterparts. But immigrants aren’t far behind when it comes to the Web.

Yet the biggest workplace channel is email. Immigrants are out front here, but only slightly, suggesting that email marketing is still the best way to reach people in either group. Web sites are a close second, and social networks are third.

Things are different at home—slightly. “Immigrants keep a distinct divide between their professional and their personal lives, particularly when it comes to using technology,” Enquiro writes. “With natives, the line is much blurrier.”

Case in point. As at work, natives lead immigrants in social media usage in their spare time. And they’re not that far out front when it comes to the Web and email.

But there are some surprises here. For starters, email is the second most utilized channel at home, just behind the Web. That’s true among both groups, again proving the case for email marketing.

And here’s an even bigger stunner: That immigrants spend less time reading print than they do visiting Web sites. That’s true both at work and at home. And they spend only slightly more time with print than natives.

These behavioral findings are more compelling than the attitudinal conclusions contained in the report. For example, we question the finding that natives prefer games to ‘serious’ work, while immigrants think of games as leisure activity. That doesn’t gibe with the work ethic shown by the natives we know.

Then there’s the statement that natives are used to receiving information in a random way whereas immigrants like methodical instructions. Those are clichés, not scientific findings.

What’s all this mean to you as a b2b marketer?

Digital natives are more likely to explore information online. They expect advanced functionality. They’re less reliant on landmark sites. They like their mobile phones. And they’re more likely to seek the opinions of others in social networks.

That said, they tend to be in junior positions, so their buying influence is limited. But it will grow in the future.

Click here to read the white paper.