If You Blog “God bless You!” What Are the Chances They’ll Sneeze?

Q: “If you call a random phone number and say ‘God bless you,’ what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?” (This is yet another of the absurd hypothetical questions to which author Randall Munroe offers serious scientific answers in “Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions”.)

This Thanksgiving week, I’m devoting all three Say it For You blog posts to myth busting through blogging, using Munroe’s book as a jumping-off place. In the world of business and professional services, there are inevitable misunderstandings about products and services, and blog content is the perfect vehicle for combating these misconceptions about our (or our blogging clients’) industry or profession.

As a corporate blogging trainer, of course, what I’m really getting as is that content writers need to find “story starters” and “idea prompts” to help sustain the creativity level of our content marketing over long periods of time. (In fact, I’m issuing a challenge to readers of Say It For You blog to write in their own ideas for using an absurd hypothetical question/answer in one of their own posts!)

A:  There’s probably a 1 in 40,000 chance the person picking up the phone just sneezed, says Munroe, but, you need to know there’s also a one in a billion chance that person just finished murdering someone, he cautions. While the sneezing rate doesn’t get much scholarly research, Munroe adds, a doctor interviewed by ABC News pegged sneeze frequency at 200 sneezes per person per year. To add to the absurdity, Munroe recalls the statistic that 60 people are killed by lightning in the US every year, meaning there’s only a one in ten billion chance you’ll call someone in the 30 seconds after they’ve been struck by lightning and killed!

Having personally composed hundreds of blog posts on the topic of sinus ailments and balloon sinuplasty, I can think of quite a number of ways to use the “God bless you” call tidbit as an idea prompt. For the benefit of my freelance content writer colleagues and trainees, though, how about these tie-ins:

• Allergists, home remedy merchants
• Etiquette advisors and human resource professionals: (“What is most politically correct to say when someone sneezes if you don’t know their religious preference?” asks Quora.com)
• Headhunters looking for statisticians

If you blog “God bless you?”, what are the chances readers will convert to buyers?