Critical Mention headquartered in New York offers their eponymous media monitoring platform for public relations and crisis management.
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eClincher
Score 7.8 out of 10
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eClincher aims to be the most powerful, complete and intuitive social media management software. According to the vendor, the product is designed to help users, businesses, and agencies manage social media presence with one platform, and offers the following capabilities: advanced publishing publishing automation (queues, RSS feeds, recycle evergreen content) engagement with unified social inbox & live social feeds monitoring content…
Critical Mention is great for schools/businesses/etc. that want to know when they are in the news. Sometimes a brand's reputation can suffer greatly if you are not aware of an issue that was posted by a competitor or media outlet If you are not in the news a lot, there is no need for this product.
Best suited for a marketer that cares about reports, needs a social media management platform and doesn't want to pay more for a more aesthetically pleasing version of a platform with the same or less functionality, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social. For a social media marketer that wants to automate some of their postings, the queues feature is great for this functionality. Not best suited for beginners to social media, as their platform is best utilized with someone familiar with the industry that knows what they are doing. Their chat support team is very good though, but this type of individual might find themselves spending a lot of time on the platform.
Critical Mention's customer service is excellent. Any time we've had a challenge finding a clip or anything, they are on top of it and go above and beyond to make sure we have what we are looking for quickly.
The ability to create tailored clips of each mention and quickly share them is unparalleled.
The reporting feature is fantastic. It makes it very simple to pull detailed reports and share them with interested parties.
eClincher supports nearly every social network and connects to a large number of sources (blogs, bit.ly, Google Analytics, Google My Business). This makes workflow tremendously easy.
Posting Groups. At higher levels of service, eClincher allows you to set-up individual brand accounts. My agency isn't at that level, so we utilize eClincher's posting groups to make 1-click groups that post to all of the profiles for each client. This allows us to quickly post a cohesive message across all channels.
Workflow management: eClincher adds plenty of additional tools to make your workflow fast. Connections to free stock photo services make it easy to add generic pictures to your content. Google Analytics and bit.ly can keep track of statistics and measure success. The Inbox allows you to handle all your clients' accounts from one screen (including comments, messages, reviews, and more). The Feeds and Influencers tabs allow you to understand your market and what's being said. Altogether, eClincher makes a 1-app solution for Social Media Management.
I believe the one frustration I have with searching in general that if the closed captioning is not correct on the broadcast end Critical Mention will miss that data. Which is not a Critical Mention issue and does overcome depending on the search. Also, it would be great if you wanted to capture a complete 30 minutes newscast, it could be done by using the search. The clips need to be about to handle 30-minute programs.
One nagging issue when using Critical Mention is that it does not save e-mail addresses when sending a report and this requires a waste of time having to type in e-mails that should be able to be pulled from the customers' contacts.
Also, it would be great if you wanted to capture a complete 30 minutes newscast, it could be done by using the search. The clips need to be able to handle 30-minute programs.
It's not very visually appealing, but this is not a dealbreaker.
The reporting features could definitely use some work. I still get more value from the native SNS pages, but this is quickly changing. They removed the "export to CSV" functionality, but they plan to reintroduce it soon. As mentioned previously, they really respond to criticism well and update the tool constantly.
The inbox could use some work. I don't like being directed offsite to view certain comments deemed "requests for further info" when they could just easily display them there.
I gave this a 5 only because I do not make the decisions to renew. When I used this at my previous company, I also recommended to the decision maker to renew this tool as it was a crucial piece to the overall client objective
Unless the price of eClincher moves to a point where it is too much to justify, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't continue to use eClincher for our agency. The value at this price-point is unbelievable and we'd be foolish to move to a pricier program purely for the sake of slicker graphics or UI. eClinchers pricing is fantastic, and is only matched by its functionality—it matches or beats any of the major Social Media Manager SaaS programs out there for a fraction of the cost. This tool is great for growing agencies, but would also be useful for any marketing department or large agency that wants to streamline their social media workflow.
Its usability was good until they changed their plans and stopped their LTD program for its early adopters who helped raise the tool by giving it positive reviews. I don't think eClincher is ethical in any sense based on the recent actions.
Look, Critical Mention follows up on an or phone call immediately or in the AM the following business day. I have called them after hours and get a live person to work through any issues that may have come up. Support seems to be job one with Critical Mention.
[In my experience,] due to the fact that they did a bait and switch on their plans and blamed AppSumo for the lifetime program ending is simply wrong. [I believe that] it's unethical to get support and reviews from their early adopters then take the plan away later.
Be patient. eClincher isn't perfect and has some software issues. These issues will be exacerbated if you get frustrated or have a slow connection. If something "breaks" or locks up, just refresh the page and re-do that step. It may take your team a couple weeks to get use to using the new system. Once they've gotten the hang of it, I'm sure they'll love the amount of time they save. I'd recommend taking your time with the set-up. Though there aren't a lot of steps to get everything squared away, you can break the process into small chunks to make sure you're managing your time. To just hook-up all the social accounts, it may only take an hour or so. But, if you want to set-up all the extra tools (such as user accounts, listening feeds, posting groups, schedules, etc.) it'll take longer. I think it took around a day to set-up completely, but your mileage my vary.
Burrelles is confusing and outdated. Critical Mention works on the side of the account team and understands our needs better. I was able to share hundreds of outlets that I wanted to be included in my online search and Critical Mention added all of them in less than a day I was seeing better results in my searches. The possibilities with Burrelles seem limited while Critical Mention's online monitoring service really lets me craft reports the way I want to
There are loads of social scheduling tools out there. I was using Buffer but then found it was limited in terms of listening and reporting so I started to look at a more professional software. I tried Hootsuite but hated the interface, way too busy with the primary focus being on feeds rather than scheduling. Sprout Social I found clunky and hard to use. eClincher was recommended to me by a friend. I think the interface (desktop and mobile) is easy to use but what sets it apart is its support - the live chat is brilliant.
Every week the department I am a part does dozens of searches on Critical Mention. We use it as our primary search engine for all things broadcast.
One negative aspect is that we do not know where Critical Mention gets their audience viewing numbers from so we just have to take it as their word.
Another negative aspect is that we are limited on the amount of time that one clip can be so we have to share several clips of the same show with our clients.
