I’m not a social media expert but with all the people going “no way corporates will pay for what they are currently getting for free”, I had to jump in with my contrary opinion. I think they would pay for the right package, and here’s why

1) Identity issues
the whole issue of identity management is important, and it *has* a cost and value - I suspect it can fly. After all, people pay for co-validated SSL certificates, they might pay for a corporate set of twitter accounts which required verification (and cost something) and would a)give people trust it is really the company it says it is b)make sure other people cannot pretend

2) Multi-user accounts
Allowing for 1 twitter stream shared by multiple people contributing, in an orderly manner, or to link multiple twitter accounts in some form of “twitter net”. And perhaps company private messages as well as public ones. Or groups.
Yes, some of those can be achieved with third party tools but corporates aren’t going to mess with that - they want a complete integrated solution.

3) Serious management tools
to archive and delete tweets, but more importantly to search and filter them. Yes, there are third party utilities, but most aim at a totally different public, the hobbyist or blogger, not the corporates who might have 30 minutes a day max for twitter itself at times.

4) better tracking.
I don’t mean the kind of keyword tracking that means you can detect and join conversations about you (that’s #7) , but ticket-style tracking, to make sure no incoming tweet gets missed (which is ok if you are a person but a PR nightmare if you are a corporation).

5) better integration
tools to integrate twitter with other company communication solutions, from their own websites and blogs to email and mobiles. Easily. With corporate languages and tools.

6) agents
i.e. ways to program twitter actions that trigger specific outside-of-twitter actions. Easily. With corporate languages and tools. Could be contests, polls, voting, orders, event booking, or meeting scheduling. Some of these can be done via third party improvised solutions, but again a corporation will want the whole package from one partner, with SLA and accountability. I think twitter sees this one

7) marketing support
- audience analysis
- audience segmentation

8) full business intelligence analysis
audience and message analysis
- user profiling
- provenance
- types of messages, independent, incoming, replies, retweets
etc.

9) filtering

I think 7) and 8) are likely to be outsourced to third parties for a while