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.
I often recommend PR.com to clients on a budget. There are some organizations, like non-profits, or very small businesses I work with who just don't have the money to spend on a pricier press release distribution service like Businesswire. For those clients, PR.com is a good alternative. You can use the free version - or elect to spend a little money to include hyperlinks, increase distribution, and so on. But there are options - and that is a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
I think PR.com offers a viable alternative to smaller businesses or nonprofit clients on a budget. When I tell some of those clients it will be hundreds - or even thousands - of dollars to distribute a press release on a service like Business Wire, I can feel them cringe. PR.com offers a free option - and also offers very low-cost options to boost the distribution, include live hyperlinks and so on - if clients do have a little $ to spend on that, they can. But they can choose. The bigger services are really cost-prohibitive for the smaller businesses.
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.
