As people in distress turn to Twitter, the Red Cross seeks the most efficient ways to respond, Wash Post August 12.
On Thursday, the Red Cross will lead a discussion at its headquarters in downtown Washington with emergency-response leaders, technology experts and at least one social media swami to try to sort through the challenges of coordinating response to floods of real-time information. “We’ll have 100 people live-blogging in the [Hall of Service], in the same place where people were rolling bandages during the first world war,” said Gail McGovern, president and chief executive of the Red Cross.
Some 70 percent of those responding to the Red Cross survey said emergency agencies should be monitoring social media.
Prior to the conference, the Red Cross conducted a major survey, the full results of which are available here. There are some significant findings here for the emergency management community, and we recommend that readers access the full report.
The two divas who write this blog attended the conference. This “summit” conference was in fact was a major gathering of key persons engaged in cutting edge social media projects. A video stream of the conference and copies of the papers provided will be on their conference blog site noted here.
idisaster 2.0 
Our compliments to fellow blogger, John Solomon, who writes via
incaseofemergencyblog.com for his interview with Craig Fugate and Fugate’s acknowledgment that he reads that blog for a candid assessment of his agency.