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.)
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Muck Rack
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Muck Rack is a public relations offering from Sawhorse Media.
$5,000
per year
Pricing
Meltwater
Muck Rack
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Muck Rack
5,000
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Meltwater
Muck Rack
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Meltwater
Muck Rack
Considered Both Products
Meltwater
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Meltwater
I started using Meltwater because of a client. I do find it much easier to use than Cision. I hear good things about Muck Rack and recently had a demo. That's probably the one I would use if I were to leave Meltwater. Cision has always been difficult to use, in my opinion.
Meltwater serves as an all-in-one platform, so it has benefitted us greatly in being able to service a variety of needs in one place. Having a streamlined platform is important to our team since it can feel counterproductive to visit a variety of products to service one …
[In my opinion,] Meltwater [Media Intelligence Platform]'s media database simply doesn't stack up to what Cision offers. It doesn't matter how nice the interface is if the data included in the database you're pulling from isn't complete or well organized. Cision can be clunky, …
Muck Rack has the most up-to-date contact database and the most common-sense functionality. It works like google to easily find, source, and sort contacts. It is much more user-friendly, whereas Meltwater and Cision don't perform regular updates and still have contacts that …
Muck Rack is very specific to social media and was first to market with their service. The other platforms offer more capabilities and "products" but Muck Rack stays true to monitoring social contacts and conversations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
