People are generally obsessed with metrics and statistics. Some on Twitter constantly talk about their number of followers or the number of lists on which they appear. Those on Facebook talk about how many friends they have. Bloggers talk about how many comments people have left in their blog or the number of times their posts have been tweeted. The media fixates on traffic to websites. Statistics and metrics are everywhere, and most people make decisions based, at least in part, on those statistics and metrics.

In an earlier video, I talked about the types of metrics and statistics that startups and small businesses should monitor. But statistics and metrics can be very misleading, and wrong. Here are four questions I always ask when making decisions based on metrics and statistics:

What questions do YOU ask before making decisions based on metrics and statistics?