• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 6, 2010

The rise of social media has given rise to a cottage industry manufacturing and distributing spurious statistics. The best ones are anything with dollar values attached, the bigger the better; they might not be helpful, but it's fun debunking them.

Here's a good one: Apparently employees goofing off on social media sites costs the United Kingdom £14 billion or $22 billion per year, according to a very authoritative-sounding study from MyJobGroup.co.uk, which operates the U.K.'s largest network of regional job sites.

Wow, that's a lot of money! Hey, UK bosses, you should probably tell those shiftless layabouts to get off the social medias and back on task right away, don't you think? What's that? You say you want to know the methodology behind these findings? Well, I suppose we could take a look...

MyJobGroup.co.uk conducted a survey of 1,000 British workers and found that 6% of them spend an hour or more on social media sites at work each day. That's one-eighth or 12.5% of the eight-hour workday; multiply those percentages together and you get 0.75% of total U.K. work hours.

Can you smell the tendentious reasoning already? It gets better! The UK's gross domestic product was £2 trillion in 2009, or about $3.17 trillion. Multiply that by 0.75% and you get £14 billion(ish). So that's how much goofing off on social media sites costs the U.K. economy.

Let's briefly review the spurious assumptions behind these silly statistics, which make you realize that the original version of "The Office" was in deadly earnest. First of all, who says time spent on social networks subtracts from time spent working? Did they ask the respondents if they stayed late to make up for lost hours? And is the eight-hour work day really uniform in the U.K.? Turns out, it's not: government statistics show 19.1% of U.K. employees worked more than 45 hours per week in 2009, while among self-employed people, the proportion was 30.1%.

And more to the point, why should we believe hours spent working equals productivity? Is there a direct 1-to-1 relationship, hours-to-pounds, or is it variable from job to job? I'm guessing it takes different people different amounts of time to do their jobs, meaning some people might be able to handle all their responsibilities with time left over for social media. It might have been more accurate to ask bosses how often they have to reprimand employees for neglecting their duties because of social media use, or ask corporate IT departments how often they have to block social sites because productivity is slipping. The study did note that "only 14 per cent of respondents admitted to being less productive as a result of social media" -- but dismissed the other 86% as being in "denial" (and don't even ask about the 10% who claimed it made them more productive). So it seems we're going to take their self-assessments at face value for the amount of time spent, but not for its effects on their productivity. Huh?