CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
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Infegy Atlas
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Infegy Atlas is a social monitoring tool that moves beyond simple number counting to providing answers that help researchers better understand consumers through advanced automated analysis of social media.
Social listening tools cover news media to varying degrees. Of these, my favorite is Talkwalker. Its coverage seems to be as comprehensive as Cision's (if there are gaps, I haven't noticed) and the boolean language and tool functionalities are far more advanced, flexible, and …
Infegy Atlas stacks up well against any other enterprise marketing/pr monitoring and analysis platform at measuring online conversation. In fact, it does this better than most other platforms because Infegy is focused primarily on the digital world, whereas most other platforms …
For a small start-up, the cost-benefit to add lift to press releases [and] particular milestone accomplishments is definitely there with the Cision [Communications] Cloud. Much of what we do, by necessity, is done internally without the benefit of outsourced press folks, so the Cision [Communications] Cloud ease of use and reporting is very important.
It is difficult to think of a scenario where social listening would be useful but Infegy as a tool would not. In fact, the only times I run into problems using Infegy for people is when they don't have reasonable objectives (they don't really understand what social listening is, perhaps) so their expectations are disproportionate to the technology. If you're looking for a social listening tool, ask how many websites (approximately) they source from, how their sentiment and other natural language processing (NLP) is developed (e.g. machine learning), how many languages they monitor, how many languages they do sentiment in, if they give you API exporting within the dashboard pricing, what exporting formats and volumes they allow you, what influencer identification they have.
Their upgraded press release templates and ability [to] pull in an entire, completed release makes the [process] faster and easier, and allows for more graphics, such as company mastheads, [are done well].
The media tracking offers the ability to find relevant placements across the entire country.
The journalist database streamlines the process of finding relevant reporters to directly connect [to] on news releases that are relevant to their beats.
The process of setting up, creating, and distributing a release is seamless, easy to use, and not labor-intensive.
Historical reach is a major strength of Atlas; unlike other monitoring/analytics services, Atlas has nearly a decade of cached social media discussion which enables important retrospective comparisons and research.
The visualizations produced by Atlas of the various metrics it analyzes are attractive and easy to understand.
Atlas is very easy-to-use. Even a novice can quickly use the tool to gather information.
The support provided by Infegy for its customers is outstanding. I've seldom encountered a company that values its customers as much as Infegy does. They are highly-knowledgeable and responsive.
Atlas' database is far more timely than other social monitoring tools - they do not rely as heavily on purchasing caches of data second-hand from other providers.
In the media influencer database, the classic Cision allowed us to do a zip code radius search to really drill down to the neighborhood level. That's because we do localized media advisories and press releases for events at neighborhood schools. One part of a big city like Chicago really doesn't care what's happening in another part of Chicago that's too far away. The zip code radius search was a feature in the classic Cision but not with the current Cision Communications Cloud. We've asked for this to be restored several times, but nothing's happened. In fact, we were told to use DMA — which actually goes wider in a search (bigger than a city), not more narrow as needed. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of what we need.
Another missing feature involves a merge field when sending out an email press release through Cision. This is the "select insert field" button in the upper right that's used to personalize a release with the media contact's name and other information. This is key for localization of the release. Many media outlets won't run a release unless it's local. While "county" is a feature in the influencer database when putting together a media list in Cision, "county" is not available to insert into a press release as a merge field. Counties are important because this is how many newspapers and health departments are organized and identify themselves. I've asked for this to be implemented, to no avail. As a workaround, we've had to use "contact city" or "outlet city."
After refining a media list in Cision using filters, I've had to download the list and take it offline to see the big picture, screen for duplicates, etc. While there is a button on the bottom left intended to help with this, it doesn't do the trick. That's because there may be multiple contacts with the same email address. In addition, one media contact may represent numerous media outlets, so this same contact could show up several times. It would be nice to have a better way to see the whole list online and eliminate both duplicates as well as those who previously opted out.
While I am happy with the product performance overall, TrendKite's recent merger with Cision is cause for concern. When we first signed on with TrendKite, I spoke with several users and the best response I received was that the company was a startup and we could expect there to be hiccups along the way as the company grew and the platform got more robust. That has certainly been the case. However, now that they have merged with Cision — a company that has grown too fast, has not focused on improving its product and has poor customer service — I have concerns that TrendKite will lose some of the qualities that have made it a great company and great product to work with.
Atlas is reasonably-priced and provides excellent value compared to other enterprise tools in the same space. Moreover, we have an excellent relationship with the Infegy team and are consistently impressed with the high quality of support they provide.
The flexibility and customization of Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* is among its most important features. Changing the dashboards, using keywords in the saved searches to pull out the best stories and the integration with marketing automation tools gives me confidence that I will able to continue using this tool well into the future. The future implementation and integration of the media contact database will complete the suite, making list management and email marketing programs much smoother. *This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
Generally, Cision performs well day to day, but it's got some annoying bugs that slow down usage/require user workarounds which is inefficient. More seriously, a few months ago, as a result of a major system upgrade, certain critical functionality was not working and I was unable to use the service for more than a day when I had time-sensitive work to execute
For Cision TrendKite in particilar, support always responded, but it was sometimes slow. For some of our booleans and search queries, we would need help refining and excluding terms/phrases that weren't relevant to our client or campaign. This sometimes took 1-2 days just to get a response back, which sometimes was too late when a last-minute report was due. This was only with the support staff, not necessarily our customer success manager or sales rep.
The online training sessions available for the Cision Communications Cloud are helpful and informative. There's more than one option - initially, I signed up for the live webinar classes on basic functions and that is what I recommend other new users do as well. If I have specific questions or something I want to learn more about, I can search the online database and find article or online training videos to get the information I need.
It's a similar product. I think Meltwater sells itself as being a bit more niche, but I have not found many significant differences between Meltwater and Cision. Meltwater's sales process is a very high pressure and their prices are inflated.
We did a deep, thorough survey of each of these tools. Some of my earlier answers have covered the distinction. I would rank the top 5: Infegy Atlas NetBase Synthesio Brandwatch DataRank Part of it is current capabilities, of course, but a big part of it is product direction. Some of these tools do not value Natural Language Processing NEARLY enough, and do not do real work to build NLP based on actual Linguistic Theory (which is surprisingly scientific, by the way), so they just do a little to monitor volume and pretty poor sentiment, call it social listening, and deliver it to enterprise clients. This is true of Radian6, Meltwater, Visible Technologies (which was acquired by Cision recently, hence its inclusion here). Of course, my list above is the enterprise level top 5. If you're looking for small biz solutions check out Mention (formerly social mention) or NUVI if you can scale to the bottom of their tiers.
