How Closely do Traditional and Social Media Based Customer Support Services Need to be Coordinated?

In Five Challenges Government Faces When Adopting Web 2.0 I wrote about the need to consider the cost impact on the organization of hiring additional “community managers” to support the addition of social media and social networking to overall customer support operations:

How Social Are Obama's Social Media Initiatives, Really?

Articles such as The Los Angeles Times’ Obama, the first social media president are popping up in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. The theme is that Obama’s successful use of the web and “social technologies” in his campaign portends a new, more open, and transformative approach to government and public sector transparency.
Command Line continues a tradition of intelligent, literate, and thoughtful interviews with his October 1, 2008 interview with Evan Prodromou of Control Yourself. The interview provides insight into the related topics of open source software commercialization, and the possible “federated” nature of post-Twitter micro-blogging.

How Can Community Based Social Media Support the Next Census

A recent AP article titled Census: Big Brother anxieties could hurt count reports official concern that the next US census is threatened by public anxiety about government activities such as immigration control and anti-terrorism measures. This made me wonder how the Census Bureau will be training its employees to overcome this public concern, and how collaborative technologies such as social networks might be used to share “best practices” among Census staff with community relations responsibilities.