A couple of days ago I was a speaker at a meeting of the Public Communicators Network. This was great (thanks again for letting me come along!) and really uplifting. My co-speaker was Catrina McDiarmid from NZAid, who have been blogging since the Tsunami-disaster in 2004, and who have had really good experiences with it. In general the Public Sector in New Zealand is slowly embracing Social Media, but steadily. Read their great and informative blog for more insights.Anyway, we also talked about the Save the Chocolate Fish Facebook group, and the missing action from the Wellington City Council. The Council should well have reacted to the over 2000 members of that group by now. The reason being that the City Council got wrongly accused of being the bad guys in this saga while it is actually a rent increase from the landlord which is causing the owners to pack up shop. None of us could say whether the Council just chooses to ignore it or doesn’t know about it. I think they are ignoring it – there was an article in the Wellingtonian (a free local newspaper delivered to every household) a few weeks ago about the Facebook group (with lots of wrong details by the way). The City Council must at least have read that. I think they are just reluctant to answer in a medium they haven’t figured out yet.Not responding to people in Social Media is a bad idea. Everyone should know after the Kryptonite events 3 years ago (in case you don’t know: the company ignored bloggers for a very long time, causing a long-term image problem – read all about it in Robert Scoble’s book). I am curious how long the Wellington City Council can keep up this strategy. What do you think?