We are highly satisfied with this tool and according to me, it is favorable in all aspects for the people that want to strengthen their links with the Publics either internal or external. It has the capability to manage relations and disseminates information to the business community. But it is not suitable when it comes to reports and its customer service.
Media Monitor Pro is a great choice for smaller organizations, such as companies, nonprofits or PR agencies, that need to monitor television news coverage when a lot of television news clips are not expected on a daily basis. It offers competitive pricing compared to some of the larger players in the media monitoring space but without the "bells and whistles" of reports and analytics, but a smaller company wouldn't need those as much as a larger company that is in the news on television a lot. It's not as great of a fit for those larger companies, particularly when there is a crisis PR situation and the company needs to be tracking news media coverage constantly and have instant access to any and all clips.
Proofing - Business Wire proofs every single release with great precision, and calls you to let you know if they think anything looks like it might be a typo. They are extremely thorough and also check with you about the way you want images or video laid out with the release so that the final presentation is perfect.
Customer Service - Business Wire has some of the best customer service I've ever experienced. They are available 24 hours a day, and always have someone manning the phones to answer your questions, proof releases, and make sure your release gets across the wire at the right time.
Interface - The Business Wire site is very easy to use, and saves previously used information and images like logos. This is standard for most wire services, but Business Wire does a good job as well.
Reach - BW reaches a very wide range of outlets, and its relationships with VentureBeat, Yahoo! and MarketWatch are great. Clients really appreciate seeing their releases in those publications.
Cost effective - Media Monitor Pro offers very affordable and competitive pricing for television news media monitoring services.
Ease of use - it's easy to view clips sent in the daily emails and to edit, download and share them with others, even if they are not registered users of the Media Monitor Pro platform.
The scope of monitoring - Media Monitor Pro monitors the majority of local news television stations throughout the country, plus a decent amount of radio stations.
There have been a few times when a minor grammatical error has slipped by myself as well as the copy editors but it's very rare for this to happen.
The cost can get a bit high if your press release is long (as price is partially dictated by length) or if you want to add a logo, image, infographic, etc.
Clip availability - quite frequently, the links to clips in the daily digest emails would not work. After clicking the link, you would be taken to the clip player and it would "load" for quite a while and then say the clip failed to play. I would have to contact the support team to figure out if it was an issue with the clip or why it wasn't loading.
Clip timing - often when you begin playing a clip in the player, it's not at the specific part that mentioned your company's keywords. That would mean I had to listen to a long clip/story to find what part was relevant to me.
I gave it this rating because the Business Wire website is very user-friendly. Being able to navigate the platform on my own without technical assistance made it possible for me to quickly and easily submit news release distributions, which can be critical at times, such as during hurricane season when we need to get information out to the news media and our customers quickly.
The team members are very quick to respond and do their absolute best to help resolve issues quickly. I also like that I can have one of them proofread my press releases before they are distributed. It always helps to have another set of eyes on the content. There have been a few times that they've caught an error that nobody else did so it's worth the extra couple minutes that it takes!
Business Wire is very easy to implement. This isn't a requirement, but it's recommended that you begin to set up saved distributions for different clients so that you don't have to start over from scratch. Rather than doing all this work on the front end, you can just do it as you send out your first piece of news for each client.
I like both services very much, but I prefer the topics, trends, and companies that Business Wire prioritizes. I also like the resources that Business Wire offers such as the tools under the "education" tab. PR Newswire doesn't quite offer the same resources. Overall, I prefer Business Wire over PR Newswire. I have not tried other similar services.
I prefer Cision PR Software over Media Monitor Pro. Cision PR Software is more expensive, but offers more options and is a better overall comprehensive solution to media monitoring and reporting as it monitors television, print and online news. Media Monitor Pro only monitors television news clips, so I have to also use another service to monitor for print and online coverage, then create my own reports from scratch using analytics and data from both platforms.
Media Monitor Pro had a negative impact in terms of timely access to some news clips. Although the reports are delivered regularly, the issues with clicking on particular clips and not having them play properly were frustrating and left us without key clips needed in crisis situations.
Media Monitor Pro had a positive impact in terms of allowing us to easily store and categorize clips through folders by topic and date.
