Cision PRWeb vs. Muck Rack

Wire press release distribution is often a luxury purchase, especially at the price point. In my experience Cision acts as if it's destined to win everyone's business just because of its name. Too often we've found ourselves being turned off by the arrogance and taking our business (and our clients' business) to alternative companies that are happy to have us.

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

• PRWeb is fairly easy to use to issue press releases. They have a review process that will look over your release before submission although this review is not going to catch spelling and grammatical errors.
• I've seen our press releases posted on industry relevant websites thanks to the reach that PRWeb provided us.
• Although I never used it because we subscribed to a different service, PRWeb allows you to create and send email blasts within their OutMarket marketing platform.
• I enjoy the ability to add a quote call out in the release.
• I also like that images or videos can be added to the release.

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

• Increasing the volume of media that can receive communication would help - going from 5,000 to 7,500 or 10,000 would be a massive help.
• Providing a social media platform in which to send out either X posts, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts to media as an alternative communication would help
• Increasing the number of podcasters and there contact details would help.

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.

The Cision PRWeb platform is mostly intuitive. It is broken into Monitoring, Social, Insights, and Outreach sections. The way Mention Streams are set up and organized has confused employees who are new to the dashboard. Under Outreach, the Launchpad and Activities tabs are a little bit redundant and could probably be consolidated.

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.

It is not an "either-or" situation. If a company really wants to put a release out on the wire, one service might be better suited for it than the other. For when a company wants to target certain countries or vertical markets (e.g. Latin America), PR Newswire would be the proper choice.

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