American Red Cross Announce Social Media Operations Center

Today my twitter stream lit up with the announcement of a cooperation between Dell and the American Red Cross to set up operations centers to manage social media services to prepare and respond to disasters. While it's not a new idea to put a few computers and volunteers in an operations center to help communicate with the public and gather information, this represents a new stage of maturity for social media in meeting the disaster-response mission.

The other news item hiding in the announcement is an acknowledgement of the existence of and need for digital volunteers. While it hints that there is a process for volunteering digitally, there are no details for any potential volunteers. I suspect there will be further announcements.

The official press release with videos and infographics is available here