Cronycle, from the company of the same name in London, is a SaaS application that provides an end-to-end collaborative information workflow for content curation, monitoring, organization, and publishing, for knowledge workers.
$49
per month per user
Meltwater
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Meltwater Media Intelligence platform is a set of public relations software tools for media monitoring, social media monitoring, and collecting brand insights. The four areas of functionality are Monitor, Analyze, Distribute, and Engage. (Note that this product combines features from the vendor Meltwater's former Buzz, Press, and News products.)
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.
Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.
Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.
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.
The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.
Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.
Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.
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.
Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.
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 looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.
As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.
