Social media and social networks are integral components of our daily personal, professional, and community lives with Facebook, Friendster, and Twitter alone having > 750,000,000 registered users worldwide. All types of communication modalities are utilized in disasters for a variety of purposes. Experience with Exercise 24 and the Haiti Earthquake and public health response amplify both the power of social media and social networks and the need to research, understand, refine, and train in their utilization in disaster management. A Haiti Epidemic Advisory System was established to provide a mechanism for care providers to report health status in camps and treatment centers, exchange technical and logistical information, provide reach-back services such as GIS mapping and data shepherding, and provide a platform for emotional support. This information was incorporated into additional platforms including Haiti User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) and Haiti Medical/Public Health Information Sharing Enterprise (MPHISE). Successes in the systems were seen in the early warning provided for cholera and social stress, the ability to link on-the-ground resources with local, national, and international assets, and the ability to inform policy makers through real-time reporting and advanced visualization. Many challenges were highlighted that deserve future study. These include: (1) how to manage the extreme volume of data flow including rating, ranking, filtering, and archiving; (2) how to effectively use social media and networks for response; (3) how to provide visualization in temporal and geospatial terms; and (4) how integrate social media with traditional media and official communications in an effective risk communication matrix.