The Faculty of Economics & Business Zagreb is one of the largest faculties of economics and business in the SEE region, with around 10 000 students and over 300 teaching staff. They offer a broad spectrum of undergraduate, graduate, integrated, master, and doctoral programs.
Morana Fudurić, an associate professor in the Marketing department at the Faculty of Economics & Business, walked us through their media monitoring journey and all the ways they utilize Determ. She’s been working at the Faculty of Economics & Business for 15 years and specializes in digital marketing, communications, non-profit marketing, and marketing strategy, to name a few. Firstly, Morana started using Determ for her courses around 2018. Later, when she formed and led the Team for Digital Marketing at the faculty level, Determ was one of her biggest allies.
Challenge
Being one of the largest faculties in the SEE region comes with many benefits but challenges, as well, Morana says.
When Morana formed the Team for Digital Marketing, the Faculty of Economics & Business only had a website and no active social media profiles. With the help of her team, they have created a strategy, started implementing it, and started seeing the first results.
There were three main challenges they faced with:
- They needed a tool to keep them informed in real-time about what people are talking about the faculty, studies, professors, and similar topics related to the faculty. This is a significant benefit for them because they can promptly react if something goes wrong and efficiently communicate to solve the problem.
- Their competition in the private sector is strong, so they needed a tool to help them analyze their competitors and benchmark performance.
- They wanted to monitor their communication efforts over the years and to be able to compare their performance from previous years.
Solution
Since she was familiar with the tool, Morana knew Determ could help her solve these challenges. Determ real-time alerts notify them every time something is posted online, and they can be aware of the online conversations at any time. For example, they discovered that potential students often seek information on which faculty to choose on Reddit. Morana points out that this provided them with valuable insights into which factors influence students’ decisions.
Also, competitive analysis helps them be up-to-date with their competitors and how they fare.
Morana points out that Determ shows them whether their communication efforts work. This helps them understand what works and what doesn’t while also allowing them to detect what topics related to faculty are most talked about. For example, Morana recalled the time after the earthquake that hit Zagreb two years ago during the pandemic. The faculty building was damaged, and through Determ, they noticed that there was a lot of speculation online about the safety of the building, classes, etc. The tool helped them keep rumors under control and focus their communication on the topics their community wanted to be informed about.
When it comes to features they use, Morana says that it depends on what they’re monitoring, but mostly they use alerts and reports. She especially highlighted custom reports as being very useful and various filtering options. As for metrics they’re monitoring, Morana explained that they’re paying attention to standard ones such as the number of impressions and number of mentions. They also look at the sentiment analysis that they find useful but also require more effort to train the algorithm as to what constitutes a positive, negative or neutral sentiment in the context of the faculty. The sentiment analysis has been proven useful in identifying the sources their mentions come from. That way, they can identify how various media outlets write about them, whether there are any opportunities for establishing better relationships, the quality of their relationships with media outlets, etc.
Impact
One unexpected benefit and a pleasant surprise that they’ve discovered with Determ is that the tool helps them immensely with the accreditation processes. Many accreditation houses ask about promotion strategies, information on what the faculty is doing, how they communicate, and what is the impact of such communication. Before Determ, Morana says they were gathering information manually, which took time and effort.
Aside from management, Morana points out that the managers of accreditation processes were delighted when they realized they don’t have to search for data and create reports manually – Determ does that for them now.
On the question of what she would point out as the best thing about their experience with Determ, Morana answered:
Morana also shared that they often recommend Determ to others:
When asked what her advice would be for people who are not sure whether Determ is the right tool for them, she said:
