Every week I look forward to reading the articles that are emailed to me from the CMO.com News in Review. This week an article titled 5 Degrees of Twitter Separation, caught my attention. I thought that it had to be a teaser for something more important than the title indicated.
I clicked on the link to discover that I was wrong. It was just a ridiculous article about how all Twitter users are removed from one another by only five degrees of separation. My initial thought was, “Who in the world cares?” So I reread the article, hoping that I might have missed something of value. Nope, my first impression was right! The article WAS based on a useless statistic that I didn’t care about. Why would someone spend valuable time and resources writing an article about how far removed I might be from Ashton Kutcher on Twitter? Most people who are even vaguely familiar with Twitter know that users don’t read 99% of the tweets that are posted by the people they are following anyway. That’s why I try to keep the number of people I’m following to a reasonable minimum; because I don’t want to sift through all the junk tweets to get to the few with some meat. This ridiculous 5 degrees of separation statistic has so little value to me as a marketing professional, that I was actually amazed that CMO.com would waste valuable space promoting it.However, it did prompt me to seek out other useless statistics that researchers have found important enough to study, yet have very little value to…well…anyone!
Here are a few:
• Most people have an above average number of legs.
• 3 out of 10 men, and 1 out of 10 women are left-handed or
ambidextrous
• Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada has the largest number of bars per
capita than anywhere else in the world
• On average, there are 178 sesame seeds on each McDonalds Big Mac bun
• Odds of being killed by falling out of bed - 1 in 2 million
• Termites eat through wood 2 times faster when listening to rock
music
• Driving at 75 miles (121 km) per hour, it would take 258 days to
drive around one of Saturn's rings
• 40 per cent of women have hurled footwear at a man
• The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime
waiting for the traffic lights to change (Although I bet that
Washington, DC drivers are above average!)
• Assuming Rudolph was in front, there are 40,320 ways to rearrange
the other eight reindeer
• You are more likely to get attacked by a cow than a shark
• Oh, and here’s one I got from Twitter: Based on various sources,
on average 54.1167% of all statistics are meaningless
Do you have a few other useless statistics you’d like to share? Post them here.
