Improving Emergency Response Decisions by Using Web 2.0

Emergency response organizations such as the American Red Cross are delving into Web 2.0 applications. Although, social media has flattened the communication hierarchy, large organizations continue to use traditional top-down modes of communication. There is an opportunity to use social media to document the events of an emergency as it happens. The knowledge of a crisis could be captured first-hand by the victims of that emergency and then fed up the communication channel in a bottom-up approach through Web 2.0 applications