But it was the voyage of discovery metaphor that was key to the speech, and it worked because it summed up the movie, Waltz’ career, and movie-goers’ reaction to his extraordinary performance. Waltz may have discovered a new continent, but a new continent also discovered him. Until a few months ago, few if any North Americans had heard of him. Basterds was his first American film, and it opened him to a U.S. audience by taking him back into German history, to a period he would rather not be associated with — a different kind of voyage. But the counterfactual account was enthusiatically embraced by both the German cast members and many Nazi victims. Or in the words of Tarantino (quoted or paraphrased by Waltz): ”This is where we’re going, but we’re going the other way.”

All far less meaningful than it could have been because almost every single one of the presenters–to a man and a woman–made three simple mistakes.

–They arrived with many slides, in some cases more than 40, for presentations that were to be no longer than 15 minutes.

–They crammed their PowerPoints with enough words and bullet statements to fill a book.

–They insisted on reading their slides, instead of engaging in a conversation with the audience.

Why do smart people make these stupid mistakes?  They do it because they are so in love with their research they that can’t bear to parse out a single point or telling fact.  They made the mistake of giving lectures when they should have given presentations.

Presenters understand that if they can communicate three ideas in a single presentation, they have succeeded.  Links to a full slide show or paper can present the details for those who are more deeply interested.  Otherwise, save the lectures for the classroom.

It boiled down to basically, it’s useless when it’s fake.  Just like in the real world, networking is only worthwhile when real substantial relationships are being cultivated.

Now, I’d add one grain of salt.  That is that for some applications of social networking, you are looking for volume and you can get away with have “less real” relationships by making up for normal symbiosis with other items of value (contests, discounts, etc).

Watch the two minute video after the jump.

Typically companies in Toyota’s position, clam up.  Statements are defensive and evasive.  Maintaining such a posture during the long life of a litigation will leave a company’s reputation in badly compromise.

Yet public opinion studies have shown that companies that publicly speak to their problems — that defend themselves but also that acknowledge faults and both pledge and work to fix them — build the trust of potential jurors, not to mention customers and suppliers.

Toyota is right to put corporate reputation first, and is likely to do better in court as a result.

A good consulting firm will not recommend the same social media approach for every client.  Depending on your objective, there are a broad range of levels of engagement that could be appropriate.

Brian Solis has a helpful post today outlining his 10 steps of integrating social media into your business.

Alex Lundry of TargetPointConsulting shows how scientific-looking charts can suggest outcomes that are nonsensical.  For example, the universe of data you select is critical.  (One of his charts shows that President Obama, when compared to every president going back to McKinley, is the all-time “pirate killer.”  His record is sadly diminished, however, when you go back to Jefferson and Madison.)

Another sin is to mislead people into believing that correlation equals causation.  (Lundry shows a slide that correlates the rise in global temperatures with the rise in the number of pirates on the high seas.)  Lundry’s presentation adds an entertaining corollary to Darrell Huff’s 1954 masterpiece, How to Lie with Statistics.

Yes, the current unemployment stats are higher than 27 years ago. But start digging deeper and a different picture emerges. Take the November 2009 stats, for example, which also showed a 10 percent unemployment rate. Dig deeper, and you find that the unemployment rate for those with four-year college degrees actually was actually just under 5 percent. In other words, the college graduate population pulls down the overall rate. By how much? Obviously, that depends on what proportion of the workforce have four-year degrees. Currently about 30 percent of Americans over the age of 25 do. In 1982, it was less than 20 percent. So the difference in unemployment rates between now and 1982 is  accounted for by the difference in the percentage of college grads.

For young people, the lesson is clear: Get a degree. For speechwriters, the lesson is: Get a calculator, and get your money’s worth out of it. Fortunately, that’s something most of us also learn when we’re young.

As the Financial Times reports, the site’s stable of voluntary editors has not grown apace with its increasing volume of articles.  The result, says the FT, is that entries “will be harder to monitor quality — and vested interests will find it easier to make alterations that reflect their own views.”

Not that the site lacks for accuracy challenges now.  The FT notes that “even optimists… agree with the more skeptical observers on this: that in terms of reliability and service, Wikipedia still has along way to go.”  Yet attempts to “subject changes by newcomers [i.e., new contributors] to approval by more experienced editors and flagging any revisions” have run into intense resistance in the hyper-egalitarian Wiki-corps.

The communications problem here is a familiar one:  The world has changed.  The organization needs to adjust. But both members of the organization (those most involved with Wikipedia are volunteers, not employees) and many of those it serves see the adjustments as violating the values and standards that got the organization where it is today and that they believe in.  Part of leadership in a time of change is to communicate how fundamental values are being preserved, not thrown over, by recognizing that circumstances have changed.