It’s been less than a year since the Red Cross told emergency agencies that they needed to listen up when people used social media to communicate during disasters. Now it’s taking its own advice.

The organization last month announced the launch of a social media Digital Operations Center that will monitor social media outputs, such as tweets, YouTube videos, and Facebook posts, and use them to answer questions, anticipate needed resources, and connect people with nearby services. Creating maps and other social media visualizations to share with the public and emergency managers will also be on the center’s to-do list.

“Our goal is to become a social liaison for people, families and communities to support one another before, during and after disasters,” Red Cross President Gail J. McGovern said in the announcement.

The center, which was developed in partnership with Dell and is based on Dell's Social Media Listening Command Center, will be part of the Red Cross National Disaster Operations Center in Washington, D.C. The new center will be staffed by volunteers from a newly formed Digital Volunteers program, the Red Cross stated.

The center’s launch is the latest in a series of Red Cross efforts to better understand and incorporate social media into disaster response in an authentic way. Among recent activities, the organization held an Emergency Social Data Summit and conducted a poll that found that one in five respondents would turn to social media for help if they weren’t able to reach 911—and 74 percent of those would expect a response in less than an hour.

“Social media is becoming an integral part of disaster response,” Wendy Harman, American Red Cross director of social strategy, stated in an August press release about the poll's results. “During the record-breaking 2011 spring storm season, people across America alerted the Red Cross to their needs via Facebook. We also used Twitter to connect to thousands of people seeking comfort…and safety information to help get them through the darkest hours of storms.”

Now that the digital operations center is online, the organization should be able to make those connections more easily and in real time, according to a Mashable article. And while the center will go a long way toward addressing the public expectations revealed by the poll, the Red Cross stresses that there's still no social media 911 call.

“We’re not at the point where we’re telling the public you can tweet at the Red Cross and we’ll send a sandwich truck out to feed you,” Harman told Mashable. “But if we see 20 tweets like that, we may.”