Critical Mention headquartered in New York offers their eponymous media monitoring platform for public relations and crisis management.
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Synthesio Social Intelligence Suite
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Synthesio, an Ipsos company (acquired 2019) offers social monitoring and engagement tools. Synthesio competes with major listening vendors like Radian6 and Sysomos.
A point of differentiation is that Synthesio offers a mix of technology and human analysis. In their view, human analysis is required to validate and interpret the data.
Customers are large, particularly French, brands.
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.
It's a very good tool. It covers every need we have for social media listening & monitoring. Bad thing is that those who were selling us the software were not much concerned about costs and were not reducing although there are a lot of market leaders like Sprinklr who are really good with compensation & value addition
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.
Synthesio has an unlimited volume, which helps us to not worry about going over budget. This helps us focus on refining our search to pull in the mentions that have the most value.
Synthesio has an excellent support team. They are always available to answer any questions we have.
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.
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
Ben Farkas was the representative that worked with us on this project, while we have been very excited with the work he provided, especially the customer service, we just did not have enough time with the product hands on to be comfortable giving it the 10 we think it deserves. As the Data tracking was done beyond our expectations and the finished product (infographic) were all excellent, we used this service to fill our need in being shorthanded to cover the data ourselves. Synthesio provided outstanding customer service, their data tracking and materials where top notch, just we lacked the hands on experience to speak to everyday use.
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.
Everything we needed was handled, in many cases during the first time we used Synthesio the representative made adjustments and explained them to us, some things we did not even consider when setting up the service.
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
I have used Meltwater, Hootsuite for the same tracking purpose. Every tool has it own pros and cons. The best way to decide is go by the reviews of the people who have actually used it. Budget is yet another factor to consider.
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.
