Newswire vs. Muck Rack

Personally, I see no difference between Newswire and other press release services. This one's available with our current PR SAAS solution, there's nothing wrong with it, and pricing is usually somewhat competitive. These days nothing works as well as actual media relations, so Newswire comes in handy for just having a solid link for a press release and getting the SEO on backlinked sites.

Incentivized

Muck Rack has the potential to be a very powerful tool that can improve PR agency efficiency across the board. The death knell for Muck Rack, and the reason why we terminated our contract early, was that they offered a complimentary six-month on-ramp to win our business. In other words, we had six full months to use Muck Rack while we were still using the other two vendors' products. Multiple team members compared results head-to-head for a wide range of our clients and Muck Rack simply did not stack up. That six-month overlap period proved to be very eye-opening and enabled us to reveal what we found to be severe limitations in terms of the quality of the database and the quality of the reporting.

Incentivized

• Communication via video calls and emails. They were responsive to any questions we had.
• Provided all the information we needed to make the decision to move forward. They had the materials around what publications and news outlets they could get into for us.

Incentivized

• The media alert function is awesome! Google Alerts can't get the detail I need, nor do they filter just for the media. I can set media alerts for particular selection factors such as everyone with "education" as their beat.
• I am liking the notes ability to log interactions with particular media. This helps me not have to track down conversation chains or actions with media.
• The interface screen is modern. I love that if I am running a search in one screen, when I click on a particular person or outlet, it opens ANOTHER screen so that I don't have use the back button. I can open, say 10 people at once and compare their notes.
• I love the PDF summaries from lists. I love the Who shared feature. I LOVE EVERYTHING in MuckRack!

Incentivized

• The editorial process was always very hard on our sale releases. Even if we followed the same structure we used to with PR Wire they would flag it as advertorial.
• The option for video is nice but would be better to actually embed it into a part of the release versus just floating at the bottom.
• Would be interesting for them to share more industry-specific releases or give the option to only get emails on specific industries. The E-blasts are always too general.

Incentivized

• When you export a media list, it does not include the email address so you have to search for it offline or on the journalist's profile. It's annoying.
• Sometimes when you save a list, not all the contacts you marked are saved and you have to do it over.
• There isn't a "click all" button to add all of the contacts to a list. You have to wait until all the people load - which isn't ideal for productivity.

Incentivized

Simply put, they are a great team, excellent support and a platform that is so seamless to use. Great reporting content, can do attitude and a solution / product that works. They are an established company and there are many 'new companies' out there claiming to offer a better service but they lack the depth and capabilities of the Newswire platform

Incentivized

It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.

Simple step-by-step process to get your news out to the world. Easy to understand process and explanation as you go through the steps. Each upgrade does have a charge, but it's pretty visible. Once you get familiar with their platform and systems, it becomes fairly easy to use to get your news published. It's also nice how quickly you are able to get the news out and published in the places you choose.

Incentivized

Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.

It was available for immediate use

Incentivized

It seemed to be okay overall an we plan on continuing to use it as we expand

Incentivized

When we have needed support, the Newswire support team has responded quickly and been very clear about what we need to know. We have never had a significant issue and they have been very helpful at cleaning up any points of confusion on our part. I always feel like they have my back.

Incentivized

Any time I have had an issue or a question about something on the platform, someone on the chat now function has always answered within 10 mins at most! Everyone I have worked with has been extremely friendly and quick to solve. There is never the inconvenience of having to call, talk to a robot, or deal with an automated email. Customer service is extremely personal and each account also has a designated account manager to oversee the relationship

Incentivized

It is a very simple product to get started using, particularly for press releases. I have no used the other functionality so I can't say for sure how easy or difficult that might be, but my guess is that the way the platform is built makes it easy for anybody to get started.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation.

To be honest, they are very similar in many ways. Business Wire, for example, is more focused on business news as opposed to other types of news. Newswire has a more general and broader application. Other news services like Bloomberg are only interested if the company is traded on one of the stock markets.

Incentivized

I previously used Cision PRWeb. It was a good service, but for what I needed it wasn't as affordable and I also found the backend system difficult to navigate and manage. I loved the ease of use and the ability to find out what I needed almost immediately once I logged into Muck Rack. Because I have to think so much already, having a platform that takes the weight off having to do a lot of extra research and ask questions to just use the system effectively and efficiently is a gift.

Incentivized

I have not really used this software feature to the level to scale at this point

Incentivized

• In a new technology area, Newswire has helped us build brand recognition.
• During the pressures put on Healthcare over the past COVID periods our presence in the Marketplace have been difficult to maintain. Newswire has been key in our efforts.
• When medical imaging AI tools exploded on the scene three years ago, there were over 150 vendors at conferences. Those that didn't promote with tools like Newswire and now gone.

Incentivized

• Muck Rack has paid for itself, as the ability to access its media database is essential to the media relations work I do on behalf of my client. By having access, it helps me make strategic choices of which media to pitch for what and when, which ultimately leads to positive client placements in key articles. This in turn leads to happy clients!

Incentivized