ARInsights’ SaaS platform is used by B2B tech and services companies for managing their analyst relations (AR) and influencer relations programs. The flagship solution, ARchitect, along with multiple complementary products, help improve AR professionals’ efficiency and productivity.
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Meltwater
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Meltwater Media Intelligence platform is a set of public relations software tools for media monitoring, social media monitoring, and collecting brand insights. The four areas of functionality are Monitor, Analyze, Distribute, and Engage. (Note that this product combines features from the vendor Meltwater's former Buzz, Press, and News products.)
If you have an AR program across the globe and want to track all interactions you have with them, this tool is right for you. As you can imagine the tool is only as good as the data you put in, so you do have to make it part of your work day to input the data. Say a team member leaves and you have to jump in to cover for them, you are able to see all the interactions they have had with analysts
Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.
Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.
The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.
As a freelancer I am unlikely to have the budget to use ARchitect on a regular basis I would however look at it seriously if asked by a client or if I was working in an agency with a significant AR practice I would look at it seriously.
Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.
Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.
In the instances I have had issues its been a little tricky to figure things out, some of the videos are helpful but getting email responses are not great compared to online chat and I have found that the response rates have been more than a day in some instances which is not as responsive as I would like compared to other platforms.I have seen ARInsights have made a number of new hires in the area of account management so I am sure that will have improved the support provided
Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.
Prior to using ARchitect, we were using Salesforce. While we did have some customization added, it did not nearly have the robustness that ARchitect provides -- especially since it is designed for AR professionals. We've been using ARchitect for about 8 years and have never looked back. Some examples of vast improvements: 1. Analyst firms/bios. With Salesforce, we needed to maintain all analyst bios -- something that ARchitect does. 2. Analyst coverage. We used to track all analyst coverage by visiting multiple analyst websites and manually pasting into spreadsheets. We now not only get a feed of coverage that can be exported into Excel, but we can also customize reports by topic. 3. Reporting. Salesforce did not provide the same reporting capabilities that ARchitect provides.
I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.
The Event Module has taken days if not weeks out of the prep process for big events.
ARchitect is a great way to allow communication with peers, without the need for extra emails, ect, because everyone on the team can see what each other is doing and who they are talking to about which topics.
As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.
