Social Media & Humanitarian Response

8 key uses of professional social networking include:

Creating new real-world contacts
Building communities (interest groups, communities of practice, virtual centres of excellence)
Crowd-sourcing (using knowledge held in the broader network to solve problems- Ushahidi is an example of a humanitarian platform which taps into the network as a resource)
Information Management
Information Sharing (Twitter is great for this; the new currency in URLs, with extremely short summaries, are a great way of finding relevant and important information quickly and centrally)
Ideas Generation/Dialogue
Relationship-Building/Maintainence (especially for geographically dispersed teams- very common in the aid sector)
Community Engagement (again, this is still undersubscribed, but in time, think of the potential to be able to network directly with community members and aid recipients via social media)