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Users have found this product to be incredibly versatile, with a range of use cases that cater to their specific needs. Customers have …
Overview
What is Cision Communications Cloud?
CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
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What is Cision Communications Cloud?
CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Cision Communications Cloud?
Cision Communications Cloud® empowers communicators with tools that help them reach the right audiences, deliver impactful results across traditional, digital and social media, and track a brand in one integrated solution. Automated analysis helps users report and translate campaigns into insights.
Cision Communications Cloud Features
- Supported: Media Monitoring and Analytics
- Supported: Media Relationship Management
- Supported: Social Listening
Cision Communications Cloud Screenshots
Cision Communications Cloud Videos
Media Relationship Management
Cision Social Listening
Cision Communications Cloud Competitors
Cision Communications Cloud Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
Agility PR Solutions, Meltwater, and Muck Rack are common alternatives for Cision Communications Cloud.
Reviewers rate Implementation Rating highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Cision Communications Cloud are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
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- Recommendations
Users have found this product to be incredibly versatile, with a range of use cases that cater to their specific needs. Customers have praised its ability to streamline communication within teams, making it easier for members to collaborate and share information. Reviewers have also noted its effectiveness in project management, with the product providing a centralized platform for planning, tracking progress, and assigning tasks. Additionally, users have found value in its functionality for customer relationship management, allowing them to keep track of interactions and effectively manage their customer base. Overall, the product has proven to be a valuable tool for enhancing productivity and improving efficiency across various industries and professional environments.
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Easy-to-use and Intuitive User Interface: Users have found the user interface of Cision PR Software to be easy-to-use, intuitive, and not overwhelming. They appreciate the well-designed and user-friendly interface of Cision Communications Cloud.
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Exceptional Reporting Capabilities: Users highly praise the exceptional reporting capabilities of Cision Communications Cloud. They find the platform's reporting features to be interactive, detailed, and customizable. Many users value how these reports help them quantify the impact of media on their business and gain insights into trends. Additionally, users appreciate the media tracking capability of Cision as it aids in measuring PR results.
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Effective Search Functionality: Users find the search function in Cision to be helpful and excellent for quickly obtaining high-level information or metrics about a publication. The detailed database of contacts in Cision is also highly valued by users who find it useful for identifying reporters and influencers. Moreover, they highlight that the new edition of the media building interface is easy to use.
User Interface: Many users have found the user interface to be confusing, clunky, and not intuitive, making tasks difficult and cumbersome to navigate. These issues have been mentioned by multiple reviewers.
Search Tools: Some users have experienced issues with the search tools, which sometimes fail to pick up all the coverage or include irrelevant content, requiring additional clean-up work. This has been a common frustration among users.
Customer Service: Users have expressed frustration with the customer service/account team, stating that it takes repeated requests to get an answer from them. Multiple users have mentioned difficulties in getting timely responses from customer service representatives.
Users recommend entering into a trial or limited agreement first to test the software's suitability for the company. They suggest leveraging the support team for training and assistance with any questions. Users highly recommend Cision for its usefulness in public relations and media relations, as it is considered the most comprehensive media list monitoring software available, providing accurate and up-to-date contact information. Overall, Cision is recommended for organizations that require up-to-date media contact information and extensive news coverage, and it can benefit organizations in various capacities. Users advise contacting a representative to receive a thorough explanation of the features and functionalities of Cision. They find Cision very useful for PR purposes and suggest setting aside time to onboard oneself with all the features and functionalities of the platform. Users also suggest comparing Cision against other similar platforms and considering the level of support needed. In summary, users believe Cision is the industry standard and a reliable software option.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(226-250 of 279)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- Adding contacts to existing lists is quite literally as easy as the push of a button.
- The Cision PR team automatically takes care of updating contacts. Within the media industry, this is important because contacts are constantly jumping around between beats or publications.
- One feature that is difficult to use is the scrolling mechanism within the lists. This has been an issue for years, and I've never seen any improvement. If you do what is typically considered a "slow scroll" where you only click the mouse up or down once, a list shoots from the top to the bottom or vice versa. I always have to resort to using the arrow keys.
- I'm not too familiar with Cision's support team. There are also an abundance of features, which is good, but can be overwhelming, so many tools aren't utilized at the end of the day.
January 23, 2017
The precision of Cision - must try!
- Cision PR Software has an extensive list of media contacts, ensuring that we are regularly able to find the media contact we need.
- Cision has an easy to follow process for setting up a media blast.
- Cision does a nice job tracking keywords to find when stories hit online and in print.
- Culling a list can take a long time. Each time you remove a topic from a list it takes 5-10 seconds to move on. It would nice if you could do a "bunch remove". That would be much faster.
- Cision test emails on media blasts don't get sent for a long time. Should be closer to instant.
- Cision needs to be more aggressive finding the smaller community and online publications in the small markets. There are regularly missing media outlets that are valuable to publicists.
January 20, 2017
OK in PR
- Keeps media lists organized
- Easy searches for media contacts
- Customer Service
- Hyper-local reporter information
- Email replacement for those who have bouncebacks
- Font variety
January 20, 2017
Cadillac PR Software
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Media List Building
- Looking up Media Outlets or Specific Media Contacts
- Monthly News Coverage Reporting
- The daily emails detailing news coverage results are set up with key words and unless you are very specific, it will pull in coverage that isn't relevant to your tracking needs.
- If the trade publications your company places articles in are super niche, they likely won't be tracked/picked up through the software, and you have to manually add them as they publish.
- The executive dashboard and dashboard widgets are a little wonky and require some finessing in order to work properly.
January 20, 2017
Cision Is a PR Type's Best Weapon
- It has helped me find relevant publications I knew nothing about before I found them on Cision
- It gives fairly detailed background information about journalists that helps me target pitches. There's nothing worse than pitching the wrong journalist.
- It never fails me when I am in a rush and need to get a particular journalist immediately and can't find them in my phone directory.
- Sometimes it is slow to load, especially when I've got a huge list of targets.
- Sometimes the search engine won't show a journalist that I know should be in the database. So, sometimes, not so intuitive.
September 09, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud is awesome, no kidding!
- Prove value of PR in driving awareness
- Share of voice analysis
- Keyword, key message penetration
- Always improving and adding new functions
- Even filtering out press releases, you'll get some slipping through
- Better way to track "organic" coverage generated from the agency's PR efforts vs. other coverage
- Organize the dashboards better, if you have a lot of reports or clients, it can be hard to tell what's what
September 07, 2016
A Life-saving Software for PR Professionals
- I like that the search function allows users to search according to geography, a contact's name, outlet, focus, title, etc.
- I like that it's quick and easy to select lists to distribute a press release to. I can usually send out an announcement (add lists, write the pitch) within 15 minutes and Cision allows me to check my work along the way.
- Cision makes it easy to build, save and edit lists
- If you accidentally delete a list, there is NO way to recover it. There should be an undo button in case this worst case scenario does occur.
- CIsion makes it a bit difficult to search for a specific person if you are already in the middle of building a distribution. Thus, it's best to know their full name or to add them to a list and then add the list.
- Sometimes the software is slow, making it take a while to build a list or do a simple search.
August 16, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud is trendy and will truly help you measure the weight of your PR results!
- Media tracking: The capability of tracking thousands of sites and generating daily emails and dashboards summarizing the coverage received by our brand and products. This information can be shared, saved or turned into reports that are helpful for measuring PR results.
- Reporting: The reporting tool is the strongest feature of Cision Communications Cloud and one that we use regularly to interactively showcase the PR results for Kawasaki and its products. The reporting is quick, easy to modify and easy to share.
- Media Database: Cision has partnered with Anewstip to provide a media database whereby the user can search for stories and contact information of journalists publishing articles on individual products, within a timeframe and for a specific publication.
- Customer Service: We have found the team at Cision to be above and beyond the industry standard in terms of customer service, transparency, flexibility and pricing. We are very happy with our account team.
- Print Publications: Cision does not actively monitor print publications. Although many of these articles are now available also in digital form, we often-times miss the newspaper and enthusiast coverage in the print-only format.
- Media Database Integration: Although Cision has partnered with Anewstip for media relations database, the two packages are not well-integrated to the point that searches are run independently and you cannot drill down to a media contact within each article and see their contact with our brand. However, this has been promised as a feature going forward.
- It would be nice to have Alexa or SimilarWeb data integrated into the website information, so that you can compare website traffic to article views, and even integration with YouTube (as part of Google Analytics) to evaluate concurrently the video views of a review produced as part of an article.
August 08, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud: Rescuing PR professionals from the Dark Ages of PR Reporting
- Very attractive dashboards. These dashboards not only look great, but they are very accurate.
- Dead easy to pull reports. I can pull a report in 2 minutes now, versus a competitor's tool - that required sometimes three HOURS.
- Support is absolutely top notch. There is no waiting for an account person - the chat system is open during most business hours and each of the agents are very well versed in both the tool and the needs of my firm.
- Cision worked with me on pricing and was able to scale to the economics of my company.
- The tool is very easy to use and not 'fiddly' like competitors' - learning curve is very slight.
- Newsletters should be able to come from my company's email address. Currently the system is set up so the newsletters come from Trendkite - and my clients are like 'Who is Trendkite? Did this come from you?'
- The filtering system for incoming coverage is fantastic. I recommend adding more filters so PR professionals can weed out coverage on things like 'sales' 'bargains' and 'deals' — which are very pervasive in incoming coverage.
- I strongly recommend outbound social media tools INSIDE the coverage dashboard so users can push out the coverage they see on the dashboard to their social networks and share. This would be huge and time saving.
August 05, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud for Understanding the News
- Sorting by social shares is key to our successful use of TrendKite.
- Puling out keyword messaging.
- Comparing topics within one dashboard is very useful.
- The valuation tool is not helpful and probably misleading.
- It would be super useful to have a default logo for reporting that is NOT Cision's logo. It is a pain to go in and change that on every single report.
- If users could choose which info appears in the table of search results, that would prevent a lot of time wasting scrolling.
August 05, 2016
Cision - best support team and UI in PR monitoring software
- Cision creates beautiful, customizable reports that makes PR metrics easily digestible for the C-suite.
- Cision has the best UI of any monitoring and reporting platform that we've seen. The dashboards are extremely valuable, as you can customize, change search dates and add/delete any metrics at the click of a button.
- Cision's customer service team is unlike any that I've seen with PR tools. Their chat team has always been available to solve issues in real-time - I have never had to wait to have a question answered or a search fixed, which matter in the deadline-driven world of PR. Their account reps are communicative without being overbearing, and during the entire sales process, they catered to our needs instead of pushing products on us that we don't need or can't afford. I can't say enough good things about their team.
- I do frequently have to add articles that the search hasn't picked up, but I haven't found that to be any different from other platforms. Our niche industry has a lot of bloggers and influencers that don't necessarily get included in monitoring tools. However, the tools makes it very easy to add an article, add a publication, or even reach out to the team to add to your search function so it will get picked up in the future.
- It's really helpful to monitor message pull-through when evaluating the quality of press coverage
- Having separate dashboards for competitors or specific campaigns helps you stay focused
- The share of
- The share of voice and the coverage leader boards help demonstrate the value press is providing the overall awareness programs
- We tend to miss articles and this makes me worried about missed coverage
- There needs to be a better way to evaluate the quality of competitor coverage for apples to apples comparisons
August 05, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud Disrupts Staid Industry, Delivering Better PR Campaign ROI
- Cision's near real-time reporting helps us stay current with client media coverage in a way that other services can't deliver. Other services offer more of a historical perspective while we can be confident that Cision is delivering the latest coverage.
- We are able to tweak our results with the boolean searches to ensure we're getting the most strategic comparisons for both client coverage and competitive research. We believe we get better coverage from Cision over other services.
- The UX is the best we've seen and our clients love it.
- While the boolean searches help us get refined results, it can be very time consuming to set up properly. We're happy with the help Cision provides to refine our searches, but the team sometimes complains about how laborious the task can be and how long it take.
- I wish you tracked social media coverage, which would help us get a 360 degree view of our client's coverage. So many articles are shared through social media that it's important for us to track those extra impressions.
August 05, 2016
Promising PR Measurement Tool
- Fairly simplistic UI
- Has selected to build the most needed features...not overwhelming
- Support seems like it's been fairly responsive.
- The ability to track hits has been way off. We've adjusted with our support person, but are still not seeing key hits.
- This makes us suspect of the overall downstream analytics dependent on this data.
August 03, 2016
Great UX and cool reporting
- Great user experience and dashboard.
- Easy to use reporting tool.
- Excellent customer support.
- I get better results in my media searches and alerts from other products.
August 02, 2016
Quick and slick PR reporting
- Powerful customisable searching with fast results (we've used other media platforms in the past that are still painfully slow to use).
- Easily customised dashboards to get the analytics you want.
- Stylish online reports you can customise and share with clients.
- Easy to add missing articles and niche magazines to the database by simply providing the link.
- Responsive customer support and account managers.
- Many niche industry magazines aren't in the database so we had to get them added (though it was easy to do).
- Only picks up online content, doesn't report on print publications and some e-book digital magazines (ie content not searchable by Google).
- Don't trust the Advertising Equivalence $ reports and much of the reporting is US-focused.
July 29, 2016
ALL the internet in one dashboard
- Reach: Cision is able to pull company mentions from every inch of the internet
- Customer Service: Cision's customer service is highly responsive. They reply fast, and they often come up with solutions, that they implement by themselves.
- Easy to use: The platform is incredibly friendly and very intuitive.
- Media coverage: As of now Cision pulls company mentions or a mention of anything you add to the boolean search. Which means that you won't only get media coverage but every mention on the internet. When you want to report on media coverage results, this turns into a hassle. Over 30% of the mentions could be junk.
- Tags: They recently released a tag feature. So you can manually tag a publication by media tiering. BUT, if you have a client with over 2,000 hits, this is extremely labor intensive.
- Identifying media tiers: They have a Tier 1 filter, and you can also do this with tags. But, it's mostly manual work. If you want to analyzing the tiering in yoru coverage you'll have to do a lot of manual work before getting something reliable.
- Human-dependant: Everything is tied down to do the boolean search. If you are an advance user you can add media lists there, to get only coverage from those, exclude pubs, exclude any mention that is being picked up by mistake, and so and so. But again, you can look to 6 hours to create a report, if you really want to make sure is accurate.
- Downloading data: they have a limit of 1,000 hits. So if you want to create a report with a whole year of media mentions, downloading the data can take you some time.
- Reports tab: On the main nav, when you go to the tab report, they are listed by title, and never by company. So if all your titles are quaterly report, EOM report, media coverage, and so, you won't be able to identify the report just by that. I always have to add my client's name to the title, even though the cover of the report has its logo. This interface could use some improvements.
- Comparative reports: You can't compare time periods, the interface only allows you to pull data from a time period and look at that time period specifically. You can always create a different dashboard, and then compare it manually. But ideally you should be able to compare different time periods in the same dashboard, so it all goes to the same report.
July 29, 2016
Simple, powerful system
- Excellent for tracking earned media. Have used meltwater in the past for tracking PR results, and it was a nightmare compared to Cision.
- Great overview of media mentions vs. competitors. Simple to see and analyze.
- System is simple enough that junior employees can learn and grow on metrics tracking.
- Filtering out aggregator sites still takes a lot of manual effort. Cision reps are great about jumping into the boolean search to help us cut what we call "junk" mentions, but it would be helpful if this was more automatic. I don't know of a single PR pro that would feel comfortable reporting what are essentially spam sites as coverage.
July 29, 2016
Our love for Cision Communications Cloud
- Media mentions have been extremely helpful for us and when the story isn't available for us to see, Cision staff are fast to assist us in finding it.
- Tracking sentiment is crucial in our line of work. Being able to easily see how we are rated is great so that we can quickly address anything negative if necessary.
- Allowing us to see how we compare to others in the market is valuable. It helps us to determine if we need to change strategy at any given time to address any issues.
- It would be great if you could click on the daily reports so that you could see the story or news cast without having to log in to Cision. That is one thing that TVEyes and Meltwater did that made it easy for me to see things quickly and easily since I'm usually very busy and on the move.
July 29, 2016
Happy and Hopeful
- Reports are visually appealing
- The staff is extremely helpful
- The formulas to create your searches are over complicated and inaccurate at times
- New coverage isn't always picked up
- Ease of use - the platform is very user friendly and responsive. Across devices the experience is consistent and simply put, it works.
- Robust features - the features and available data to report on are definitely a huge plus. You can get very specific in the types of media you want to monitor and specific searches you want to build. It is very simple to build a broad search or a super specific search to monitor.
- Customer support - bar none, it is some of the best support I have experienced. Whether we need help building a search or using a feature, I would describe the support as friendly, knowledgeable and white glove. They go above and beyond to the point where some times they feel like another member of our PR team.
- Ad Value - the biggest drawback is the ambiguity of ad equivalency. While this is a feature that is very frustrating, it goes without saying that this is not an exclusive issue to Cision, it is industry-wide.
July 28, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud review from PR agency
- Boolean is easy
- Customer service is good and the chat feature is super helpful
- Grp
- Graphs look nice
- Picking up articles more than once when it's the same content
- When it picks up press releases and I've clicked the feature for it not to
- Sometimes it's slow to load when I make edits to the graphs on the dashboards and I have to refresh the entire page
July 27, 2016
Cision Communications Cloud Review
- Tracking online mentions of our clients and their competitors
- Analyzing coverage for key terms
- Analyzing coverage spikes
- Stripping out coverage that we don't want to follow
- Changing colors on Cision graphs
- Going beyond coverage and into real results
July 27, 2016
Eureka! I can finally do my job!
- Clip management - The dashboard provides a very quick analysis of current coverage and is very easy to manipulate for key messages and date ranges.
- Searching archived articles - Cision is the only system that I have become aware of that lets the user search articles going back as much as three years. Since we are new to Cision in the last 6 months, it's very helpful for us to back search and get an accurate year-year comparison using the same software.
- Reporting - Easy-to-export (and lightning fast) reporting capability.
- Love the ability to view/download/edit broadcast clips.
- Excellent customer service!!!
- Have on occasion, missed articles from major news outlets.
- Broadcast clips aren't always complete and cut off the beginning or the end. However, the customer service folks are able to retrieve the full clip and provide it relatively quickly.
- Would like to be able to export reports directly from individual widgets on the dashboard. Also make the standard reports a little more customizable.
- Work on reducing duplicate clips in the platform.
- Would like to be able to run a report based on articles that I have 'starred' as my top article.
- Would like to be able to run a report from the platform based on top articles with the highest readership. Right now, that can only be done by exporting the data to a spreadsheet and self-analyzing.
- Would like to be able to run a report based on the number of times top ['x' number] outlets are mentioned.
- Would like to be able to generate comparison reports based on one year [or other selected period of time] to the next.
July 27, 2016
Leader in organic PR measurement
- Organic PR Measurement
- Competitor Analysis
- Social Sharing Analysis
- Social Listening