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.)
N/A
Rival IQ
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Rival IQ in Seattle delivers social media analytics and competitive insights to help digital marketers make informed decisions, improve results, and better understand competitors. Using benchmarks and comparative analysis, Rival IQ's technology is designed to enable digital marketers to uncover new opportunities, identify trends, and track results across all the main social channels and the web.
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.
I think it's a great tool to be used by any brand. The interface is user friendly, creating a safe space for account managers and social media managers alike. The only instance in where it wouldn't be optimal is if you're looking at very historical data, or tracking additional influencers (not competitors) or if you have multiple profiles (within 1 channel) to track.. But this suits our needs very well.
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.
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.
Managing companies within your installation aren't always easy. You can map companies to landscapes, but if you run out of slots for companies (based on your subscription tier) you end up having to swap companies frequently to get the reporting you need.
RivalIQ is competitively priced on a tiered structure, but if you want to add small sets of additional data within tiers, such as additional companies, the pricing is prohibitive as to force you into the next tier up.
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.
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.
Support is continuous and very helpful. Email, phone, and chat support are always on and someone is always there to help. Your CSR will contact you quarterly to take your temperature and offer assistance or training, if necessary. Feature requests are taken seriously. They share their product development roadmap, which is a major plus.
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.
I demoed this platform as an alternative to Rival IQ and it has some of the similar features but the cost is much higher so it wasn't in our budget. If I had the choice, I might choose Falcon over Rival IQ because the visuals are much better than they are in Rival IQ.
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.