Coveragebook vs. Meltwater

Coveragebook is great for any organization that needs to regularly track client media coverage or even just trending news stories to send to clients in a professional looking report. It is ideal for small, medium, and large PR and marketing firms. For firms or companies more focused on internal communications, this would not be a regularly used tool. For those focused on external communications, it's a must-have tool that helps save time and makes it easier for people at every level of an organization to create branded coverage reports that are easy to download or link to and share with clients

Incentivized

If you practice media relations in your role, Meltwater is helpful. You can do research to find relevant publications and journalists, build media lists, export them to share with a team or client and you can also keep notes on your campaigns. I like using it for research, although I do research outside the platform, as well, to be sure to be thorough (and some of the info in the database is outdated). I would say if you don't practice media relations, it's probably not as useful. There are other tools that do a better job if you want to search for media or social media mentions, for example. If you are looking for an all-in-one media relations tool that's relatively easy to use, Meltwater is probably a good fit.

Incentivized

• Screenshots of each article for the entire length of the site. It allows viewers (internally) to get an idea of what the webpage looks like.
• Can include offline media.
• Creates a slideshow presentation quickly and easily.
• Each screen grab has a URL back to the webpage to read the article.

Incentivized

• Up to date contact information. It is actually relevant and active info, not always the case with others.
• The user interface is better than most tools. While not perfect, it's pretty easy to figure out how to get what you want.
• Their support is excellent. Anytime I've needed help I can call, but better than this, they proactively call and assist.

Incentivized

• More ability to customize cover (title page) of report
• Provide total (collective) backlinks for all pieces of coverage as a metric (currently you can only do one at a time)
• Allow custom metrics for the offline coverage (currently, you can only add add'l info in the comments section so it looks like a quote vs. numerous metrics on the slides for online clippings)

Incentivized

• Their tracking system for media mentions isn't perfect - we have stumbled across several posts mentioning our company/product that were not picked up by the platform. While frustrating, we send these URLs to our rep and their tech team ensures that that website will be monitored moving forward.

Incentivized

We have had great success with Meltwater Buzz the past 2 years. The reporting has been great for our board reports, seeing the conversations going on between our followers helps us to learn who our audience is and what we can do better on our social media. The analytics we see on Meltwater Buzz we could not get anywhere else

Incentivized

Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.

Coveragebook is incredibly easy to use--so easy to use that we've never run into any issues that required additional support from the Coveragebook team. In the event that there is an issue, they have a detailed help section on the website with answers to FAQs to assist professionals at every step of the process.

Incentivized

Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.

Incentivized

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

I didn't look too closely at the other services above because it was quickly apparent that they do different things than Coveragebook. We were looking for a reporting and valuation tool but didn't need help creating or distributing releases or finding client mentions. (Our PR programs are very targeted towards relevant trade press; we aren't looking for thousands of mentions in any/all media outlets.) Coveragebook accomplishes all the tasks we required at a reasonable price.

Incentivized

Meltwater serves as an all-in-one platform, so it has benefitted us greatly in being able to service a variety of needs in one place. Having a streamlined platform is important to our team since it can feel counterproductive to visit a variety of products to service one client's needs. So, Meltwater has been essential in ensuring our needs are met through one destination.

Incentivized

• The ROI is mostly on time. I used to spend hours upon hours designing and inputting information for reports. Now, Coveragebook does all of the hard work for me.

Incentivized

• Improved PR reporting, for sure.
• Competitor analysis for clients and ourselves.
• A great ability to track the news and understand particular news drivers for certain industries, allowing us to get our client in front of the media at or before the perfect moment.

Incentivized