Cronycle vs. Ion Interactive

Prior to adopting Cronycle, our research team had a variety of different ways in which they would discover, store
and share information. These methods were often inconsistent, with many smaller
teams or sub-groups of researchers operating independently of others. In many cases, content that was potentially useful to more than one
colleague was not being shared at all. We had thousands of different sources,
accessed through varying methods and stored in different locations/systems, and
very few colleagues would have had an idea of which sources other team members
were using. Furthermore, we became aware as a team that while between us we
were pulling in a lot of information, much of what was being discovered was not
necessarily being acted upon, or indeed being read by the colleague to whom it
was most relevant. We also needed to become more targeted, and indeed more
selective, in the information we were seeing, and Cronycle -specifically through the Sources Library, the Feeds, and the tagging and notification functionality - has enabled us to do
just this. There has been a genuinely transformative outcome to our information gathering ability, borne out by specific metrics, which Cronycle has also provided us with via the Enterprise account.

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

• relevant, spot-on content to any of the 80.000 topics they curate.
• Content curation, quickly assemble insights from a multitude of sources
• collaborating, commenting, and creating insights around any of the topics you focus on with a team is a breeze, and in one central place.

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• For some reason logging on for a few months does not go as easy as usual, because nowadays I need a least two attempts to log in.
• I think I do only use the core functionality of Cronycle: getting indication info by keywords via multiple sites.
• Vice versa: if people come to me with a suspected issue, I double-check via Cronycle by entering that issue as search in found results. A low occurrence often indicates the suspected issue likely is not so severe.

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

Any issues with the platform have always been resolved quickly. I have never previously worked with a third party software provider whose support team is as responsive.

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

Hootsuite publication prep and scheduling is great, better than Cronycl (a manual process) Cronycl management of feeds, filtering creation of topical boards are excellent, Hootsuite doesn't offer this. Cronycle I find it easier, more attractive, and better filtering than Buffer, though Buffer was slightly better at the publication prep.

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• Cronycle is my secret superpower (well, it was until now!)
• I have landed and retained clients by wowing them with insights their own teams have not previously provided
• I have aced speaking gigs and secured many more by engaging audiences with insights gained through this tool

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized