Critical Mention headquartered in New York offers their eponymous media monitoring platform for public relations and crisis management.
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Visible Intelligence, discontinued
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Visible Intelligence, developed by Visible Technologies and formerly offered under the name Cymfony, was a listening tool with an analytics dashboard. Visible was acquired by Cision, and later 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.
The only time I have trouble recommending Visible is to my clients of specific markets. We work with several McDonald's co-ops and we can't narrow our searches to a specific region for example, to the state of Iowa or Kansas City region.
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.
The way the cloud of related terms, a.k.a "social media differentiating terms", was organized into a chart with the frequency of appearance was extremely helpful. Each term was also a link to other terms that may be related to your research as well, which was insightful.
Visible Intelligence allows you to view the differentiating terms across platforms. This is particularly a useful tool when trying to compare and understand what is being said and where exactly (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Most of the social media analytical tools allow you to view "sample content". However, and I find this extremely useful in many cases, Visible Intelligence allows you to directly connect with the person that posted the content. Because of such feature more clarification can be accomplished.
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.
Firehose terms. I wish there was a place in setting or somewhere that let us know what firehose terms we currently have. To make it really great it would be nice for it to also show a history of what terms we had in the past with dates and the start dates of current firehose terms. I can't tell you how many times we've had to reach out to our rep to let us know what we currently have in place and when you have multiple users in the agency using the tool, it's near impossible to keep track of when changes were made.
Exports, I wish there was a way to have larger exports. And if you can't, an easier way to break down larger exports. For example, say my timeframe is only 1 day and I have over 20,000 results in that day– there is no way for me to export all of those results by breaking it down because my only options are most recent, most relevant, klout, most confident, most influential, most followers, positive, negative. There's no option to break down 1 day by the first 20,000 then the second 20,000 and so on. Instead I have to then manually break it down by media type and hope each one of those is less than 20,000.
Author influence, I know this algorithm is tricky but at the very least I think it could be better explained within the tool so when clients ask questions we can answer them. It could be nice to have some filtering options with this because several authors get a 99 score and it's not valuable information.
Tagging, when tagging content it is extremely annoying that I can't add new tags in the "select tags" drop down. It takes too much time to go in to where I can add new tags and then go back to where I was.
It'd also be nice to have setting for a stream where only a certain folder or folders of tags display. So when I'm in client x's search the only tags that display are client x's instead of all 5 clients and I have to keep scrolling through to find what I need.
Archive, when you hit archive on a post it does nothing. It stays in your search and ends up in all you charts which skews your data. What I do now is I created an actual tag called "archive" (because if I didn't tag it with that and I exported everything nothing in the excel doc tells me I hit Visible's archive button for that result) I export the search, I remove everything I tagged as "archive" in excel and then I manual make charts. When I hit Visible's "archive" button it should be completely removed and if I made a mistake and I want to un-archive it, there should be a section where I can go and see everything I archived and be able to un-archive it.
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
I loved the way Visible Intelligence was similar yet different from Radian6. Although I have more experience with Radian6, it still wasn't hard to use and get familiar with Visible Intelligence. I personally liked how easy it was to do your "thing" and conduct your analysis using VI. That is plenty of reason for me to consider re-using it in any project that requires social media analysis.
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.
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
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.
