FOI Request - Social Listening and Online Monitoring

Request 101003334356

1) Does your organisation monitor social media and online forums/blogs for mentions or discussion about the organisation?

2) Do you employ a third party company to do this monitoring work, or do you do it in-house?

3) How do you keep track of this - do you use a specific software or programme, or manual searches for key words or terms?

4) What do you call this monitoring? For example, some organisations call it 'social listening' although this might not be the common term you use.

5) Please provide the full list of words, terms, phrases, websites and usernames you monitor in order to do this work.

6) If you employ a third party to carry out this task, please say which organisation and how much you pay them for the work.

7) Please tell me how long you have been doing this monitoring work for as an organisation and whether it is covered in any policy you have within the organisation. If it is covered, please provide a copy of the policy

Response 04-07-2023

1)  Yes

2)  Both. We monitor organically on socials and use our media distribution contract for tracking media coverage.

3)  Google alerts via our news distribution network and manually.

4)  Social media monitoring and coverage tracker.

5)  There is no set list, as requirements and trends vary, as such Section 17 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 – information not held – is applicable.

6)  Part of our media distribution contract - we don't pay for an add-on.

7)  Approximately between 12-18 months.
Internal policies are currently being approved and may not be shared at this time, they are also exempt under Section 30 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002  – Prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs, because if these Policies were in the public domain it is possible that methods to navigate around our monitoring methods may be developed.