Cision PRWeb vs. Muck Rack

PRWeb served it's purpose for Strouse by sending news out to new audiences although this never generated an overwhelming amount of traffic to our website. If you are only interested in issuing PR and getting your name out there, then I think PRWeb is a fine solution. I find PRWeb less appropriate if you really want to drive traffic to your site through a press release in hopes of creating sales. During the selection process I would be interested in knowing what sources my PR would be submitted to. Is it being submitted to relevant websites? Will links be provided on all of these websites? Ask yourself, will these websites benefit my companies SEO?

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It provides a newswire option at a very reasonable price.
• The pricing is in a sweet spot for many startups who would want to use it.
• It hits up all of the key media outlets that you would expect a wire service to be connected to.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• One issue we ran into with media tracking was that when it came to smaller or more niche media, it had a hard time tracking hits from those outlets for our clients.
• Building larger media lists was time consuming and cumbersome.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We are unlikely to renew PRWeb because I feel that the costs outweigh the benefits of the service. For a company like ours (small business with about 60 employees) we don't have enough press that warrants monthly coverage. We may look at using PRWeb on an as needed basis, 3-4 times a year for single submissions, but that would be the extent of it. I could see PRWeb being much more beneficial for large companies that are constantly needing to issue press.

Incentivized

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.

It is a very simple program to use. They walk you step by step on what is necessary to complete a PR.

Incentivized

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.

I have only required support from PRWeb on two separate occasions and they handled my issues without any problems. I was a bit confused at first not sure if they had received my requests but shortly after I received responses and was able to move forward with my press release.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Implementation of PRWeb required very little of Strouse. It was a quick process and we were almost immediately ready to use the platform.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation.

I've used all these services. Which one to choose depends on the situation. It's good to have knowledge of all the options. Of course, there are many other services as well, and even free services that a very small business or nonprofit can use that do similar things. I find PRWeb is a good fit for many of my clients because of the pricing. Photos are increasingly important in getting news picked up and PRWeb doesn't charge you an arm and a leg like some services do to include a photo

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It was definitely a cost decision for us, but the ability to have access to their media database was by far the most useful and needed tool for us.
• For tracking media hits, it saved us time tracking the majority of hits. Where it didn't save us time was with smaller, more niche media.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized