Critical Mention vs. uberVu (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

I liked uberVU a lot, and thought I was lucky to have found them (they actually responded to my tweet when I was vendor-searching, which was good to know as they were doing just what we were planning to use the software for). They are relatively small, which allows to have a great personal relationship and we felt very valued as a client. They provided great value - some of their competitors allow for more features (which explains their higher price), but there was no way to opt out of the unnecessary features to lower the price - uberVU didn't have any of that, it was just what we needed and in our price range

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to see what people are saying on social media about clients.
• Creates reports that can be limited to certain time frames.
• Able to see the reach of users so you can breakdown by influencers.

• 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.

Incentivized

• I honestly didn't have any issues with them. Being able to set the real-time alerts as "every 15 minutes" took some figuring out to do, and we were still in the trial mode while we did that - it wasn't particularly intuitive for other users, but once we walked them through, everything worked well.

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

Incentivized

I find it a great tool in the digital strategy world to see what people are saying across social platforms. It's much more efficient that doing a search on the platform itself and provides a lot of information extremely quickly

It's great for quickly looking up a specific clip, but this platform makes it difficult to select and accurately report on a high volume of clips

Incentivized

All the users found the product intuitive and easy to use.

A couple of times it was a little slow, but this didn't result in any negative impact for us. There was no downtime as I could recall or notice.

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.

Incentivized

Every time we needed help, the support was great. We had no issues, mostly needed usability walkthroughs and had questions about features.

I got the training while I was evaluating and in the trial period. Then I trained the others myself

Critical Mention implementation was easy and fast. Their support and training were awesome.

Incentivized

Not applicable since it is SAAS - all we needed was to sign up, which was easy

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

Incentivized

Radian6 and Brandwatch were on the short list. We picked uberVU for its combination of price and features. It did not have extra features we didn't need, they were customizable and flexible enough to meet all of our needs

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easier to handle crisis.
• Ability to find out statistics to quantify and qualify what you're doing for customers.