D&B Hoovers vs. Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

D and B hoovers are best suited when you want to target companies based on their revenue, employee strength, location, and the kind of business the company is doing, this helps to make a cohort and find companies that are most likely to buy you products or services. However, D & B hoovers has some scope for improvement when it comes to getting details of individual decision-makers in those companies. It's not bad but can improve.

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.

• allows you to search within broad industry categories or very detailed subcategories using a variety of methods (NAICS, SIC, D&B's internal coding system, keywords, etc.)
• Has a variety of personnel that you can view and sort by level, name, or email availability.
• Oftentimes emails for C-level personnel cannot be located on the company website or easily found elsewhere online.

• 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.

• We should be able to "exclude" words from titles or company names
• Able to access titles and email addresses more easily - not look at list first, select find matching contacts button, then go back to sort to add titles contain and email addresses, etc. This is a two-step process to get what I need.

• 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.

Hoover's just isn't compelling for the types of information they provide and the pricing model. But again, this is from the very limited perspective of a below entry level analyst who is just finishing their studies. It is probable that for some segments of industry, Hoover's has vast wealth of pertinent information. For example, when looking into agricultural industries for a consulting firm, I did not save any time with their service because information on factory locations and assets was scant. Using Google earth to view the square footage of the facilities to estimate assets was often more helpful.

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.

Because it's easy to use

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.

Always available on desktop or mobile.

Meets our needs

They are terrific at giving instruction/webinars. I am able to call, directly, to an individual and talk to that person. I'm not talking to a robot. They give personal service which is really special.

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.

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

I was not part of the implementation as that stayed with Dev team.

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

While there are several softwares that offer similar options, Hoovers does stand above the others as one of the most accurate softwares I have used. They seem to put a lot of work into keeping their information up to date and accurate. It definitely makes the life of a salesperson much easier.

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.

We're a small company with few users, so scalability has not been an issue.

• Honestly cannot say we really drove any new sales using D&B Hoovers to prospect new companies and leads. We obtained higher data quality with other tools like ZoomInfo and Skrapp.
• A year long contract that isn't honored on their side due to lack of customer service and poor data quality definitely does not equal ROI.
• Spent significant time sanitizing and cleansing inaccurate data provided by their service. Since time is money in business, that was a loss in that aspect.

• 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.