Cision Communications Cloud vs Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

• The Vocus PR Suite has an extensive media outlet database so it allows public relations and communications professionals to find the right media outlets and contacts for any media market in the United States and for just about any specialty or trade news media.
• The Vocus PR Suite is very user-friendly. It's easy to navigate and find what you need, plus offers a lot of options for how to organize your contacts and media lists.
• The customer support team at Vocus is always very helpful and gets back to you quickly when you need assistance. Vocus also offers online/teleconference training classes plus a great help section within the portal that contains articles and "how to" videos.

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• Keyword Search - We are able to find who has recently written about a topic. This allows us to target those who have been recently interested in what we are writing about in our release. It is also a way for us to expand our contact list to reach people who may be writing outside of their normal beat/genre.
• Search Function - We take advantage of several saved searches that track media mentions. This uses boolean logic to get us the exact results we are looking for. The search function is also great for searching for mentions of our competitors, narrowing our search to a specific product we may have done a campaign on or a more broad topic outside of our company alone.
• Reporting - Meltwater allows us to set up our own customized reports that are emailed to us on a regular basis that we request.
• Dashboard - Each user is able to set up a dashboard (homepage) for the platform with the reporting functions that are specific to what we are interested in or need to be aware of. This is a great day-to-day update of our media mentions.

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• Not every article is automatically picked up. Some major papers get skipped some of the time, even when the proper keywords are present.
• Some articles/outlets are delayed in when the system retrieves them. Some articles come through from years ago, that do not match the date filter requirements.
• Building reports to graphically look how you would like is not easy to do as a user, without requesting customer assistance help.
• Customer service/account rep is not always the most attentive to your needs. It could take days or weeks to get a response sometimes.
• Expensive!

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• While the platform has seemingly unlimited options, it takes a while to learn. Our product support representative has been really helpful in web tutorials, and the Knowledge Base documents explain some things in detail, but it may be helpful for Meltwater to publish videos of them navigating the site.
• Meltwater finds obscure placements, but it misses many on prominent web sites. In the last month, it's missed stories on Forbes, New York Times, Huffington Post and Bloomberg.
• Meltwater can improve its updating of media contacts. I think they do this annually, but I average six or seven dead email addresses for every 25 reporters whenever I build a distribution list.

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• The ROI is immeasurable. The amount of time you save using Cision compared to using the Internet to not only find the right reporters to contact but how to contact them (their email and or phone number) is hard to determine, but in some instances, for a big project, I don't believe it's a stretch to say that it can save you weeks of work hours.
• Cision is a cost-effective tool, period. Rather than putting the time in to research media on your own, or paying a PR agency to build media lists and contact reporter for you, Cision will save the company thousands of dollars annually.
• I don't think there is a negative impact on ROI for any Cision customer, and they will work with you to find a program that works for you -- i.e. if you are a non-profit, school, or small business, they scale the package to find something that will be affordable.

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• I've yet to really see a way to measure ROI by using Meltwater.
• We have a goal number of positive mentions by percentage that our organization strives to reach. Meltwater keeps excellent track of this.
• I like what Meltwater does for us, but I don't see extreme positives or negatives in terms of business objectives. It is simply good for what I need it to do.

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