Media Monitor Pro is a great choice for smaller organizations, such as companies, nonprofits or PR agencies, that need to monitor television news coverage when a lot of television news clips are not expected on a daily basis. It offers competitive pricing compared to some of the larger players in the media monitoring space but without the "bells and whistles" of reports and analytics, but a smaller company wouldn't need those as much as a larger company that is in the news on television a lot. It's not as great of a fit for those larger companies, particularly when there is a crisis PR situation and the company needs to be tracking news media coverage constantly and have instant access to any and all clips.
Muck Rack has been well suited for me when reporting and providing value add and ROI reporting to clients who are investing in publications. Not only has it been great creating media lists, drafting, sending out, and tracking pitches, but the ability to track coverage and export a report that showcases the reach, impact, and media value has been so beneficial for me. So, if you are working with clients in an external communications capacity, then the Muck Rack tools are very flexible and can fit your needs very well.
Cost effective - Media Monitor Pro offers very affordable and competitive pricing for television news media monitoring services.
Ease of use - it's easy to view clips sent in the daily emails and to edit, download and share them with others, even if they are not registered users of the Media Monitor Pro platform.
The scope of monitoring - Media Monitor Pro monitors the majority of local news television stations throughout the country, plus a decent amount of radio stations.
Muck Rack offers a robust and highly targeted media research tool that allows you to build a customized media list to launch a media relations campaign.
Muck Rack's customer support team is quite good and is very responsive.
Muck Rack's sales team does a great job of explaining how their solution will effectively address the needs of the organization.
Clip availability - quite frequently, the links to clips in the daily digest emails would not work. After clicking the link, you would be taken to the clip player and it would "load" for quite a while and then say the clip failed to play. I would have to contact the support team to figure out if it was an issue with the clip or why it wasn't loading.
Clip timing - often when you begin playing a clip in the player, it's not at the specific part that mentioned your company's keywords. That would mean I had to listen to a long clip/story to find what part was relevant to me.
Creating coverage reports is time-consuming and it is difficult to filter out unrelated coverage with the Boolean operator-driven functionality
Muck Rack does not integrate with our other monitoring and reporting tools, so for sharing reports everything needs to be manually exported and added to our reporting software.
Muck Rack does not include broadcast coverage monitoring in its normal package, and the functionality of the added broadcast tool is limited compared to other coverage monitoring tools.
It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.
Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.
I'm sure it's fine. I have never used their customer support, not even when a list does not save. I just figured there isn't much they can do since it was a search. They do have live chat to get answers quickly but most of the time I'm working on lists after hours (since it's a lot of admin and I can do it front of the TV) and no one is available.
I prefer Cision PR Software over Media Monitor Pro. Cision PR Software is more expensive, but offers more options and is a better overall comprehensive solution to media monitoring and reporting as it monitors television, print and online news. Media Monitor Pro only monitors television news clips, so I have to also use another service to monitor for print and online coverage, then create my own reports from scratch using analytics and data from both platforms.
Cision Media Contact Database. Honestly, it has been a long time since I used it, but I do remember being unhappy with the service. I thought its UI/UE was clunky at the time, but I didn't complain because I had free access to it.
Media Monitor Pro had a negative impact in terms of timely access to some news clips. Although the reports are delivered regularly, the issues with clicking on particular clips and not having them play properly were frustrating and left us without key clips needed in crisis situations.
Media Monitor Pro had a positive impact in terms of allowing us to easily store and categorize clips through folders by topic and date.
It's hard to measure ROI but I can say this: I have discovered and build relationships with media I may have had a hard time locating before. MuckRack has probably increased my efficiency by 50 percent and doubled my effectiveness.
I haven't looked a media databases in about 2 years but it is a much more cost effective media database than the big, traditional ones that everyone else has.
