Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Tom McGuire Director Of Communications (and Media Relations)
Read full review Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic. Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more. User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review It does not provide a visual for volume over time. The visuals aren't excellent, and would require an export to create better looking graphics. The interface isn't intuitive and sometimes requires clicking around to find things that seem like they should be under a different title. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
Read full review Reliability and Availability Not really an availability issue, but concurrency licensing rules mean that only one user can be logged in at a time.
Read full review Performance This has not been an issue. It is actually beating TweetDeck when we are tagged within a post that TweetDeck is monitoring.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
Read full review Online Training We had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.
Read full review Implementation Rating Critical Mention implementation was easy and fast. Their support and training were awesome.
Read full review Implementation was so easy I dont even remember it!
Kelly Cates Manager, Online Marketing, Brand Relationships, Direct Sales
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review We've used
Sprout Social &
Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or
Hootsuite , except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed.
Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Lowered costs and overhead when Expion got introduced as we now use one centralized solution for all of our social media work We can finally calculate ROI with ease and understand our campaign performance through proper tracking and analytics Competition tracking was never easier Read full review ScreenShots Sysomos, now part of Meltwater Screenshots