Help a Reporter Out (HARO) vs. Meltwater

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) was (and today, HERO is) an incredibly valuable tool that effectively bridges the gap between journalists and PR practitioners, and it filled a need on both ends. A perfect solution to an ongoing industry problem. When I have a client that needs media coverage, and a lead is shared in the daily email that fits the client's expertise, it creates an opportunity that we may never have otherwise been able to identify.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Pushes PR opportunities right to your desktop several times a day
• Provides media opportunities for just about every industry and if you monitor it regularly, on just about every topic you can think of
• Provides an easy way to contact reporters with relevant information
• Media outlets are verified for you

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I've noticed that some queries are incredibly vague to the point where they could or could not apply to me. I feel like they should implement more strict parameters on what the query has to include.
• Sometimes the outlet is marked anonymous which is not beneficial at all to those who are browsing queries. I think the outlet should be required as that is a pretty essential piece of information to consider.
• I think they email slightly too often. My inbox gets flooded with HARO emails and I'm not able to go through all of them because they get buried. Maybe explore a new strategy to organize the huge amount of queries that get submitted every day.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It takes only a few minutes to set up your account. Then, the rest is just checking the push emails, and responding to relevant queries.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

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

They are different tools. While HARO pretty much gives you feedback on media opportunities you can pitch for and allows you to get in touch with the reporter, so you can get exposure and they can find people for their news. Cision allows you to syndicate your press releases. You need to have a written press release in order to use it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• A hard thing to measure in terms of actual sales dollars, however, being able to provide fresh content is essential to any brand. When someone mentions they saw the published piece or it grows organically from social media, that is a win.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized