As the leading telecom operator in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1997, Joint Stock Company Mtel a.d. Banja Luka offers unique communication solutions unified under the m:tel corporate brand. In the more and more dynamic BiH market, they offer the latest telecommunication services in the fields of telephony, landline network, internet, data, and IPTV. Mtel has achieved outstanding business results, evidenced by a record number of over 1,600,000 friends and users of all services.
For this Case study, we talked with Stefan Ličina, Head of PR. His responsibilities primarily include coordinating all the internal and external communication in the company. When it comes to his day-to-day tasks, Stefan says that he usually has a weekly or monthly schedule, because as is common for his profession, unexpected events happen on a daily basis and he needs to react promptly and/or change priorities. One constant thing is that he starts his workday going over the press clippings and mentions in Determ.
Challenge
m:tel’s primary objective in acquiring the media monitoring platform was to address the need for real-time mention tracking. With the substantial volume of public interest they receive, gathering all relevant mentions in real-time to ensure prompt responsiveness became imperative.
Additionally, since they’re sending at least two press releases daily they wanted to monitor which media outlets are publishing them and which ones they need to follow up on to ensure that their news is covered.
Solution
Stefan says that in his team there are four of them who are active daily users of Determ in various ways – some are creating monitoring and creating weekly reports, and some are focused on monitoring all of their PR activities. Other colleagues use Determ sparingly, mostly to monitor some specific topics of interest.
The thing Stefan points out as the best part of his experience with the Determ is the speed at which they get results in their feed, as well as the overall user experience of the platform and customer support.
“For modern PR, especially in big companies, and organizations, Determ is number one when it comes to speed and providing an overview of what’s happening.”
Stefan Ličina
Head of PR
To Stefan, Determ’s mobile app is the most important because he often needs to leave the office, and the app helps him stay up-to-date with everything. Stefan also highlighted daily and weekly reports as extremely useful.
Just looking at the last year, when they were doing their annual report they had all the data they needed in one place. Also, they were able to analyze their relationships with various media outlets and the added value they achieved through their PR efforts. Additionally, they were able to detect media outlets who were writing about them even though they didn’t have an established relationship before. This information helped them create strategies for this year in terms of how to position themselves and provide relevant information to different media outlets and their audiences.
“For that reason, as a PR professional, I’m saying absolute yes to Determ. We’re extremely happy with it and would recommend it to everyone.”
Stefan Ličina
Head of PR
Stefan also commented on one of Determ’s most popular features Synhia, AI assistant, and how its options can help PR professionals.
“Synthia can be really useful for days when there are a lot of mentions to go through. Especially if the mentions are negative and they require a prompt reaction.”
Stefan Ličina
Head of PR
Impact
Stefan noted that Determ is priceless for him because it quickly provides him and his team with information about what’s going on with their keywords and topics of interest without needing to do it manually.
“If we’re talking about the regular 8-hour workday, I’m pretty sure it would take me at least two hours to monitor everything manually. Taking into consideration the size of our company and our communication, the number of releases we do daily to be precise, it would take us a lot of time to do everything. Determ allows us to focus on productive planning and creating better-quality press releases. Also, we probably wouldn’t be able to find all of the mentions manually through Google search or know the important metrics to us such as reach, impressions, sentiment, and influence score. This is something we couldn’t do manually. We could only have the list of what was mentioned but not the real metrics that Determ provides.”
Stefan Ličina
Head of PR
When asked what advice he would give to people who are currently testing out Determ for the first time, Stefan said:
“Primarily, I think they should take into account the time they spend on these tasks without Determ, and how much time would it take with Determ. Also, will the reports they manually do be as good as what Determ offers? They should think about the extra time they will get for planning and strategizing.”
Stefan Ličina
Head of PR
