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.
Muck Rack has been well suited for me when reporting and providing value add and ROI reporting to clients who are investing in publications. Not only has it been great creating media lists, drafting, sending out, and tracking pitches, but the ability to track coverage and export a report that showcases the reach, impact, and media value has been so beneficial for me. So, if you are working with clients in an external communications capacity, then the Muck Rack tools are very flexible and can fit your needs very well.
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.
Muck Rack offers a robust and highly targeted media research tool that allows you to build a customized media list to launch a media relations campaign.
Muck Rack's customer support team is quite good and is very responsive.
Muck Rack's sales team does a great job of explaining how their solution will effectively address the needs of the organization.
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.
Creating coverage reports is time-consuming and it is difficult to filter out unrelated coverage with the Boolean operator-driven functionality
Muck Rack does not integrate with our other monitoring and reporting tools, so for sharing reports everything needs to be manually exported and added to our reporting software.
Muck Rack does not include broadcast coverage monitoring in its normal package, and the functionality of the added broadcast tool is limited compared to other coverage monitoring tools.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I'm sure it's fine. I have never used their customer support, not even when a list does not save. I just figured there isn't much they can do since it was a search. They do have live chat to get answers quickly but most of the time I'm working on lists after hours (since it's a lot of admin and I can do it front of the TV) and no one is available.
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.
Cision Media Contact Database. Honestly, it has been a long time since I used it, but I do remember being unhappy with the service. I thought its UI/UE was clunky at the time, but I didn't complain because I had free access to it.
It's hard to measure ROI but I can say this: I have discovered and build relationships with media I may have had a hard time locating before. MuckRack has probably increased my efficiency by 50 percent and doubled my effectiveness.
I haven't looked a media databases in about 2 years but it is a much more cost effective media database than the big, traditional ones that everyone else has.
