Cision PRWeb vs. MutualMind (discontinued)

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

• 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

• MutualMind gives us a view into the reach of social content we produce on behalf of our advertisers and the engagement that content generates with shoppers.

• 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

• MutualMind gauges sentiment around social conversations but does so with the standard margin of error found in most social analytics products. The nature of human conversation makes it difficult for a machine to categorize sentiment with 100% accuracy. MutualMind gets sentiment right between 50% to 70% which is within acceptable industry averages for this type of product. With additional tuning (which MutualMind provides) the accuracy levels will increase.

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

Reliability and flexibility (MutualMind's willingness to jointly produce new functionality)

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

As a company that's only 3 years old, MutualMind's toolset is quite usable but it could use some tweaks in the user interface, which they are constantly working on.

During a recent upgrade period, MutualMind had a small window of unavailability. I am confident they have addressed the root cause and do not foresee any future issues.

The product's performance has improved greatly in the last year and we anticipate seeing additional improvements in coming months based no planned infrastructure changes.

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

MutualMind has always been quick to address any issues or questions we have.

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

Incentivized

Not really...MutualMind was very professional and helped with all stages of our setup and 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

As mentioned before, Radian6 and Sysomos Heartbeat.

• 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

• By showing increases in engagement and share of voice (defined as the amount of content generated for our advertisers versus the amount of content generated for their competitors over time) we are able to correlate content to incremental sales data provided by our advertisers.