Alumni Spotlight – Helene Fritzsche, MBA '11

For more than 10 years, Helene Fritzsche was working as manager for the online subsidiary of the biggest newspaper in Austria, the Kronen Zeitung. Among others, her responsibilities included product development and project management of all digital solutions. Social media was – of course – a big topic in her position, particularly how to argue costs and how to measure success of activities. She wanted to further develop her professional capabilities in this field, and selected the MBA in New Media and Information Management to help springboard her career.

‘’When I chose the MBA program at the MODUL University, I was curious about getting deeper into the topic of social media. What was of most value for me was that the program supported exchange of information between lecturers from all over the world and students with years of work experience. In my eyes “this is the best possibility to look beyond one's own nose”.

At the end of the courses, the question on how to measure social media activities was still not answered clearly for me. Social media monitoring, a quite young discipline, seemed to provide the right tools. Therefore, I decided to choose this topic for my master thesis: to find out what social media monitoring tools deliver and which ones are recommendable for business usage.

Doing research on this topic and analysing existing tool evaluations it was obvious very soon, that there are no standards yet on how to measure social media in general and on what social media monitoring tools deliver. Each study on tools included only a selection out of hundreds of possible solutions, providing no information on new products entering the market. So, how should a manager in charge come to a good decision on which tool to implement? Therefore, I developed an evaluation framework for social media monitoring tools, which can be applied without deep technical knowhow.

As I was on maternity leave when I finished my studies and received my MBA grade, I had some extra time to think about the results of my research. Feedback from vendors, my professional network, and the defence committee convinced me that it would be a good idea to publish my findings and carry on. Therefore, I founded an initiative, called SOMEMO, aiming to disentangle information on social media monitoring and its tools. In order to give an example, I applied the framework on different tools. In January, I published a comparison as an infograph including 26 of them, which led to quite some media coverage.

Meanwhile, I further developed the evaluation framework and applied it on almost 50 different monitoring tools from all over the world. A new comparative study will be published within the next months. The valuable network I created now includes all those vendors and international social media experts. I’ve already had the chance to present my work to current MBA students at MODUL University and at different industry events. At the moment I consult start-ups and established companies – and am negotiating with a well-known company about permanent employment.’'

The analysis of social media has been among the Department of New Media Technology's most active areas of research. MU Vienna developed the award-winning US Election Monitor 2008, for example, conducted a social media survey among Austrian managers in collaboration with Cisco Austria in 2011, and currently extends the analytical capabilities beyond social

media within the DIVINE project.