Today I hit What Does Corporate America Think of 2.0? with Andrew McAfee from MIT.

What is 2.0? It’s a technology toolkit that helps groups get work done (collaboration, innovation, search, coordination) and philosophies that make use of this toolkit.

McAfee showed multiple media, analyst and futurist clips hailing the arrival of social in business and characterized them as “a little overenthusiastic.” In reality, business leaders are more skeptical and pessimistic. We are, in fact, in the early stages of a very long journey.

The corporate mindset is risk-adverse, enamored of status quo, burned by technology hype, skeptical, unimpressed by features and novelty, busy, uninterested in social revolution, hostile to auto-obsolescence, ROI seeking and are convinced of their own uniqueness.

However, they are aware of new tools and approaches, aware of organizational dysfunctions, pragmatic, swayed by theory, need evidence, love narrative, are keenly aware of what their peers and competitors are doing, and are afraid of being left behind.

How to talk to your bosses about technology:

  • Comparisons instead of demos – before and after demos
  • Present theories and frameworks, not jargon – grounded in bullet-proof previous work
  • Present data, case studies, narratives – but not about Google, Amazon and the usual suspects
  • Activate peer effects — “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” – Lew Platt, former CEO of HP.
  • Anticipate and allay concerns
  • Show that your understand their problems.
  • Don’t treat them like geeks or dopes.

Learn more at 20AdoptionCouncil.com.

The keynote today featured Evan Williams from Twitter, who announced @anywhere. I can’t sum it up better than this.

Then I hit the Twitter Indispensable Tools panel with Nick Halstead from tweetmeme, Laura Fitton from oneforty inc, Guy Kawasaki from Alltop, Amita Paul from ObjectiveMarketer and John Yamasaki from Seesmic.

Recommended tools from the panelists:

An audience member asked about the inability to search backwards futher than two weeks as a key missing piece of the Twitter experience, and Scoble detailed the issue surrounding meta data (time, location, tags) attached to each tweet. Currently tweets have very little meta data, which makes searching archives very difficult.

While I agree, I think having access to the full data dump of information today has tremendous value. As Fitton said, there is enough content in the verbiage of the tweets today, you can still conduct a basic search. Personally, I would pay Twitter a monthly fee to have access to all of my Twitter history, and I know marketers would pay to have access to that level of user-history. Until then, we’re stuck with Google’s archive.