Mention vs. Owler

I would ask if they have ever used a software like Mention before, if not, I would totally suggest they start with it. It's easy to use, easy to set up and while it may be confusing at first, it's probably the cheapest and most effective. My suggestion to a new marketer or first-time user of this kind of software would be Mention.

Incentivized

This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.

• Mention has nice support and implementation function. They will do some of the harder work for you (e.g. refining your alerts).
• It helps us to easily track and rank influencers, which improves the effectiveness of our Public Relations (PR).
• You can filter and refine alerts e.g. by language. This is useful if you want to break into new markets.

Incentivized

• Owler enables the user to quickly find the data and information that he or she needs.
• I appreciate the customizable dashboard where you can set alerts and track companies you select.
• The latest news regarding the funding rounds of startup companies is especially helpful.
• The top competitors to companies provided by Owler often give me a great point of reference for my competitive analysis.

Incentivized

• Yes, I just said it is clean and easy to use, but there is always room for improvement in even the most perfect software. I would personally love to see the ability to custom message options a bit more or just customize the look and feel of your dashboard.
• Bugs. Mention works great 95% of the time. The other 5%, you may run into major crashes or see mentions that you cleared coming back, etc., but nothing that is a deal breaker or unexpected with a tool like this. Worth noting nonetheless!
• Better plans. This is a small issue, but I wish the lower plans has some basic reporting.

Incentivized

• The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
• Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
• There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
• It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
• They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information

Incentivized

Not really an applicable question as this is a free service, but if they charged $100 / year (GageIn's price) I would still license the service.

I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography

Incentivized

I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.

Mention works quickly and its user interface is easy to use. Alerts update regularly and I've never noticed any lag. It integrates with our CRM via Zapier, but this is not something which we use yet. The only thing I would say is that it takes time for Mention to reach its full potential. It only starts to rank influences from when you set up the alert, so it can take a few weeks to build a map of your influencers.

Incentivized

The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.

Mention always responded promptly and gave excellent support. Any problem we had with the software, from login trouble to broken features were addressed quickly. There was once a problem with our quota, where we were unable to see results we should have been able to see. We sent an email, and within an hour, the situation was resolved!

Incentivized

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.

Currently, there are no other tools available with the features that Mention has possible according to our knowledge and experience. We firmly believe that Mention has placed themselves in a category all of their own. In the ten years, our company has been around. We have yet to come across any other companies like Mention. Pretty sure there may be another company or competition. None like Mention in our opinion are available, however.

Incentivized

I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.

Incentivized

• Mention has had a positive impact on my business because it gives people the impression that I was following them, even if I might not have been. It makes me appear active on all social media platforms, even if I ONLY look at my mentions each day!
• Because I have only used the free plan but have benefitted greatly, I would say that my ROI is fantastic!
• The only negative impact that Mention has is that I do get a daily email in my inbox, and it is one more thing to check. However, it is worth the time.

Incentivized

• The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
• Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
• Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.

Incentivized