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Last week IBM looked at the effect of social networks at online retailers on Black Friday and found… nothing.

Or almost next-to-nothing: IBM said social sites generated a mere 0.34 percent of all online sales. Referral traffic to retailers from social sites was also just about zero: IBM said Facebook only accounted for 0.68 percent of visits to retail sites, while Twitter had a giant goose egg.

Can’t be, right? Those are huge platforms. Surely IBM got its numbers wrong, via some sort of technical or statistical oversight?

If so, you’d think that Facebook or Twitter might want to publicly dispute those stats, since they poke a hole in their “buy our ads, use our services, and sell more stuff” pitch.