Social media is an environment which supports and encourages users to express attitudes and opinions. However such fragmented and disorganized source is difficult to monitor, analyze and interpret. Automated sentiment analysis might be the next step of the marketing research providing a valuable insight in the consumers mind.

Higher education is a dynamic global industry with highly competitive and developed market. Universities communicate their international programs to attract prospective students interested in studying abroad. This study addresses a question, whether there is a difference between communicated characteristics of international programs among universities from various cultures. Websites of seventy universities coming from different cultural clusters are analysed through data-mining methods. The results suggests that marketing communications in international higher education do not stand on cultural grounds as there are only minor differences between international program communications across the world. The only difference in the group of prime international higher education providers was found between the Anglo-Saxon universities and the rest of the world.

Tourism development has an irreplaceable role in regional policy of almost all countries. This is due to its undeniable benefits for the local population with regards to the economic, social and environmental sphere. Tourist destinations compete for visitors at tourism market and subsequently get into a relatively sharp competitive struggle. The main goal of regional governments and destination management institutions is to succeed in this struggle by increasing the competitiveness of their destination. The quality of strategic planning and final strategies is a key factor of competitiveness. Even though the tourism sector is not the typical field where the benchmarking methods are widely used, such approaches could be successfully applied. The paper focuses on key phases of the benchmarking process which lies in the search for suitable referencing partners. The partners are consequently selected to meet general requirements to ensure the quality if strategies. Following from this, some specific characteristics are developed according to the SMART approach. The paper tests this procedure with an expert evaluation of eight selected regional tourism strategies of regions in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Great Britain. In this way it validates the selected criteria in the frame of the international environment. Hence, it makes it possible to find strengths and weaknesses of selected strategies and at the same time facilitates the discovery of suitable benchmarking partners.

Website quality measurement tools have been largely static and have struggled to determine relevant attributes of user satisfaction. This study compares and contrasts attributes of user satisfaction based on usability guidelines seeking to identify practical easy-to-administer measurement tools. The website users assessed business school homepages according to six criteria and fulfilled a randomly assigned yet typical task. After completing the task, respondents assessed the same six website quality/satisfaction criteria again. The consumer–product relationship seems similar to the link between a user and a website. User satisfaction, just like consumer satisfaction, is asymmetric and non-linear. Content and navigation have been identified as key ingredients when users judged website quality, alerting web designers and website practitioners to focus more closely on those attributes. Similar lessons can be drawn for marketing professionals, who typically supervise or determine the content, structure and other website facets.

Tourism development planning is now part of the regional policies of all Member States of the European Union. Strategic plans at national or regional level are specific instruments of regional management, which contain results of the planning process and ensure the development of tourism in the selected region. The paper analyzes the representatives of these plans from Great Britain, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. It evaluates their contents and form of processing according to suggested united methodology respecting main principles of current quality management. The paper tests the process of evaluation on a selected sample, compares different approaches to planning and identifies the best transferable practices as the first step of creating the complex system for evaluation and quality improvement of regional planning in tourism.

The systematic tourism promotion can be understood as a specific instrument of regional policy of Czech regions. At the present time almost all regions are disposing with the particular programme document focused on tourism development in a given region. Nevertheless, these documents are considerably different in the case of their form and content, which complicates the process of their evaluation and comparison. In order to review the documents it is necessary to set objectively the generally valid requirements on the quality of elaboration and derive from them the measurable quality marks. This is the content of the first stage of the research. Its main aim is to draft the complex procedure for evaluation of the overall quality of the tourism development programmes.

This paper summarizes the results of the second phase of the research. Its aim was to draft a procedure for evaluating the quality of tourism development programmes. The concrete requirements and quality marks were determined in the first phase of the research. So-called key characteristics were defined in order to assess the level of fulfilment of these requirements which should correspond with the quality marks. An interval method of assessment is used to evaluate the extent of matching the key characteristics in several quality levels. The evaluation process continues with the method entitled Distributively-delegative Awarding Points. Its result is the final value of the quality marks, characterizing the quality of the content and the format of the document. The chosen
procedure was applied to eight regional documents with the aim to determine the current state and the most common differences in the achievement of the quality marks.

Competences are important prerequisites for any kind of job. Competences accumulate across a long period of time. Key competences for lifelong education have been suggested even by the European Parliament and EU Council in December 2006. This article provides analysis of a nation-wide survey of desired competences at the time of global economic uncertainty. As such it may assist educators in designing suitable courses and curricula that provide graduates with competitive edge on the labor market. Key words:

Snaha pochopit motivaci spotřebitelů k nákupu a jejich myšlenkové pochody je významnou oblastí zkoumání. Na základě empirického šetření mezi téměř 117,000 majiteli osobních vozů v pěti největších evropských automobilových trzích jsou v tomto příspěvku testovány vzájemné vazby mezi spokojeností s nákupem, spokojeností s užitím a zákaznickou loajalitou. Ukazuje se, že usilovat o nového zákazníka či extrémně pečovat o dealerskou síť nemusí být nejlepší kroky automobilových firem při realizaci jejich marketingových strategií.