Great post and comments.
I’d pay a little, £2-5 personally, to retain access with the people on my twitter stream. I can imagine my work paying but I’d have to play twitter differently if it was purely work funded. One organisation’s digital engagement strategy is another user’s spam.
What interests me most is, as you say, the undefined business models for provision and use of these social web type tools. If advertising is the best chance of enabling free services, I’m intrigued about the metrics advertisers use and over what time periods. I’ve never understood tv ratings, how can they really know people and watching and how can they know cause and effect, and most interestingly, what hit rate do they expect?
I suspect the onus put on public sector organisations to prove return on investment on social media engagement is way higher that commercial advertising.
Bit of a tangent but relevant to our world, I think?