Thursday, April 24  

24% of statistics are made up

Well, actually I just made that up! I have no idea what the figure is.

Listen in to any radio or TV news and you'll see that they often mention this survey, or that survey. On the radio especially, you'll usually hear a sound bite of the person who released the results.

My business does quite a bit of media. Often our media releases quote survey results. And those survey results give such great credibility, that the release often gets a run just because of that.

Sometimes we do our own surveys, often we use other sources - like the Australian Buruea of Statistics.

Here's an example:

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics an estimated 3 million purchases were made by 650,000 Australian adult Internet shoppers for their private use in the 12 months to May 1999. This represented a 60% jump in Internet shopping over the previous 12 months.

Brendon Sinclair, Executive Director of Gold Coast based Tailored Consulting, said today electronic commerce represented a "double-edged sword" for small business.

"Whilst the Internet does open up new markets for business, it does greatly increase the competition. It's not just the retailer in the next suburb who is the worry, the competition now includes the huge multi-nationals," he said.

Etc, etc.

That's from an old release, but with that first line I have established credibility from an excellent source and then gone on to position myself as an expert. It's simple, it's easy and it's effective.

Cheers.