Abstract: The literature on the organizational use of social media in crisis response and management is largely concerned with communication between organizations and the general public (“citizens”). By contrast, there are few papers on the use of social media within organizations for operational purposes. One essential operational capability in such organizations is Command & Control (C2) or its equivalent. Our research focuses on the use of social media in C2 for crisis management at the operational and tactical levels. To enable the use of social media in C2, Jongejan and Grant (2012) extended Reuter, Marx and Pipek's (2011) theoretical framework. In the research reported in this paper, the extended framework was tested by performing a proof-of-principle experiment for a famine relief scenario with human subjects in the laboratory. The results show that more extensive concept demonstrations and field experimentation are justified.