TrustRadius Insights
Muck Rack is a versatile tool that caters to various public relations needs, as highlighted by its users. With features like media …
Starting at $5,000 per year
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What is Muck Rack?
Muck Rack is a public relations offering from Sawhorse Media.
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Pricing
Muck Rack
5,000
Cloud
per year
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Muck Rack?
Muck Rack Video
http://siteoptimized.com
In this Motel Minute, author and marketing strategist Doug Motel shares about one of his favorite Public Relations Tools: http://muckrack.com a great way to connect with the media to help get your story out there.
Muck Rack Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Muck Rack is a public relations offering from Sawhorse Media.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.4.
The most common users of Muck Rack are from Small Businesses (1-50 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
- Cons
- Recommendations
Muck Rack is a versatile tool that caters to various public relations needs, as highlighted by its users. With features like media database, media research, news trend insights, and media list building, Muck Rack is relied upon by professionals for their PR efforts. Users appreciate the efficiency it brings to tasks like pitching, media list development, research, reporting, and recommendations.
One of the key use cases of Muck Rack is building and maintaining relationships with members of the media. Being able to conduct detailed searches for media using keyword searches and other factors makes it easier for users to identify and connect with relevant journalists. Additionally, Muck Rack's media alerts feature allows users to stay updated on target media, client names, and key trends.
Users find value in the credibility verification aspect of Muck Rack as well. They rely on the platform's media database which provides reliable information including social posts of media organizations. By backgrounding inquiries and verifying company credibility, users can ensure they engage with trustworthy sources while avoiding scams or questionable entities.
Overall, Muck Rack is considered cost-effective compared to other media databases, offering an intuitive platform that saves time by automatically providing contact information for outreach purposes. It simplifies tasks such as identifying journalists to pitch on behalf of companies and enables easy communication within teams by allowing sharing of notes about conversations with journalists. The software's ability to update contact information based on relationships with journalists further streamlines PR efforts.
Keeping up-to-date with news trends and influential journalists is made effortless through Muck Rack's daily email feature. It also assists in monitoring news stories and tracking who shares journalism on social media. The advanced search features consistently impress users as they allow for refined searches and exclude certain words, ensuring more targeted and accurate results.
In summary, Muck Rack serves as a valuable tool for public relations professionals by offering a range of functionalities geared towards pitching, media research, news trend insights, and relationship building with journalists. Its cost-effective nature, reliable information sources, and time-saving features make it a preferred choice for managing PR efforts, monitoring news stories, and strengthening media relationships.
Media tracking and reporting: Users have praised the media tracking and reporting features of Muck Rack, which allow them to showcase the ROI for their clients. This feature has been highly valued by reviewers for providing valuable insights and demonstrating the impact of PR efforts.
Pitching functionality: The pitching service's functionality is highly appreciated by users as it helps them maintain consistent formatting and provides valuable feedback on best practices. Reviewers have mentioned how this feature has improved their pitching process and helped them achieve better results in their media outreach.
Easy search and find reports: Users find it easy to search and find reports on Muck Rack, whether by name or outlet, which has been extremely helpful for them. Many reviewers express satisfaction with the platform's search capabilities, making it effortless to access relevant information quickly.
Cons:
- Outdated Visual Appeal: Some users have expressed a desire for an updated look and feel of the reports, as they find the current visual appeal to be lacking in terms of design and aesthetics.
- Incomplete Tracking Coverage: Several reviewers have mentioned that there are occasions when articles are not captured based on their specified keywords, requiring them to manually load the articles themselves. They would like to see improved tracking coverage to ensure comprehensive monitoring.
- Manual Media List Management: Many users wish for the ability to upload media lists in bulk for cleaning, vetting, and updating purposes. Currently, they have to add each entry manually one by one, which can be time-consuming and tedious.
Users highly recommend Muck Rack for finding credited journalists and media outlets. They suggest taking advantage of the tutorials and resources offered by Muck Rack. Users also believe that Muck Rack is the best PR tool on the market and recommend being clear on your needs when speaking with a Muck Rack representative.
Additionally, users advise checking out Muck Rack for media tracking, especially for internal PR. They praise the customer service of Muck Rack and recommend requesting a demo and asking questions to understand how Muck Rack can meet your expectations. Users think Muck Rack is great for beginners in the PR industry and suggest visiting the webpage and social media accounts of journalists for more information. They also recommend trying the demo of Muck Rack and reaching out to customer service for assistance.
Despite the learning curve, users find Muck Rack worth using. They love the product and the sales team of Muck Rack but wish for deeper insights into local reporters and media outlets. Lastly, users think Muck Rack is a great tool for compiling research and quantifying reach. They also recommend using this software for media list building and monitoring brand mentions, suggesting it as a cross-reference when using Cision to make media list building easier.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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September 22, 2022
Muck Rack - basic flaw in their business model. No unsubscribe feature that works.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We currently have paused using Muck Rack after less than 90 days due to, in my experience, their inability to unsubscribe recipients from distribution lists. Previously we used it to pitch qualified journalists on our very specific international golf travel programs we operate. We took the view that we wanted the emails to generate under my name & email address as opposed to a generic PR mailbox. This decision allowed us to quickly identify the above issue as recipients would email me repeatedly to unsubscribe, which, in my experience, Muck Rack has acknowledged they cannot do.
- After less than 90 days, we are still trying to understand. Thus far, the jury is out on the quality of their lists, as anecdotal evidence suggests it is barely maintained and updated.
- Unsubscribe needs to be functional
- Quality of journalists within a specific subset of interests needs to be verified more accurately & timely than we are currently experiencing
June 17, 2022
Muck Rack is the team I needed.
I use Muck Rack to support our public relations efforts for our clients. Whether pitching, media list development, or overall research, reporting, and recommendations, Muck Rack is my go-to for all of those strategic public relations decisions. I also use it to build relationships with and stay connected with members of the media. I find it easy to use and reliable.
- I love the media tracking and reporting to showcase the ROI for my clients.
- I like the functionality of the pitching service. It keeps my pitches consistent with formatting and provides great feedback on best practices, etc.
- I like how easy it is to search and find reports, whether by name or outlet, it has been super helpful for me.
- The look and feel of the report would be updated a bit. I like the categories, but visually making it more appealing would be nice.
- I would say improving tracking coverage. There are times when articles aren't captured based on my keywords, etc. that I have to load manually.
- The ability to upload media lists to be able to clean, vet, and update. I can do some manually one entry at a time, but not in bulk. At least not from what I've seen
June 14, 2022
Driving media impact for comms professionals
I currently use Muck Rack to:
- Identify journalists to pitch on behalf of my company
- Share notes with others in my company on my conversations with journalists
- Set ownership of relationships with journalists to help my colleagues identify who I can pitch on their behalf
- Update contact information based on my relationship with journalists
- Set monitoring alerts on topics I am following
- Gather and update journalists' contact information
- Frequently update and share updates on journalists' job moves
- Makes it easy to identify journalists by outlet, topic, area
- The content in monitoring reports could be vetted more to provide more helpful news stories
June 10, 2022
Don't Sleep on Muck Rack!
I use Muck Rack for media list building, outlet vetting, pitching, and finding information about journalists and the beats they cover. I also have used their media monitoring services to report on coverage and share of voice to clients. I cannot imagine doing my role without it as it is basically a bible and starting and end point for everything I do in public relations.
- Provides journalist contact information
- Customer service
- Media monitoring
- Provides details on media outlets and the audience they reach.
- Updates to contact information- but their customer service will fix if you ask.
March 26, 2022
Looks great on the surface, but make sure the results are what you expect before buying
As a PR agency, we require specific software to do our jobs. Among those requirements are a media database for creating media lists, and a media tracking and coverage reporting suite to capture and share results with clients. Muck Rack offers both of those solutions in one product and is supposed to do it seamlessly.
- 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.
- When using the media research tool, we found that Muck Rack was missing huge swaths of industries and reporters within those industries.
- Coverage reports suffered from the same issue. Although there's a tool that allows you to manually input coverage you're aware of, Muck Rack missed critical, high-value placements that change the entire results picture.
- There's no way to purchase one tool or the other from Muck Rack. It's sold as an all-or-nothing solution. Prior to using Muck Rack, we had two different vendors who did each of these things really well. Upon signing with Muck Rack we traded two vendors for one and excellence for lackluster performance.
December 17, 2021
Pitching and monitoring made easy
We use Muck Rack for pitching releases, maintaining relationships and contact with industry and area reporters, and monitoring and reporting on earned media coverage.
- Muck Rack allows us to host releases on our website or client websites and point to them in a pitch email, helping drive further site traffic.
- Muck Rack monitors and keeps us up to date with changes in status for journalists we monitor.
- Muck Rack allows us to monitor unlimited clients and create detailed coverage reports on any business or topic we need.
- 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.
August 17, 2021
A complete solution for public relation management
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have been using Muck Rack to manage our public relations in a professional manner. It is no big surprise that this tool has made our works easy as we can monitor news and stories and it helps in strengthening our relationship with the media. It is helpful in making a list of the most important contacts that can prove beneficial. This tool is great to manage public relations which are very important to be managed in the current age. Above all, its contact management feature enables us to keep our important contacts listed and we have found this tool amazing for PR planning and tracking as well.
- Muck Rack has a feature to shortlist the most important contacts.
- It enables an organization in keeping a record of almost everyone and one can find the reports of others.
- It is a very effective tool in PR planning.
- Its alert feature is quite useless and doesn’t work well.
- Its pricing is quite outrageous and is unfair as well.
August 09, 2021
The standard for PR outreach
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We currently rely on Much Rack to identify journalists for outreach as well as potential marketing affiliates. Much Rack's search tools are excellent and the database is constantly updated with new or updated contacts. The advanced search features allow you to refine searches by excluding certain words, doing exact word searches, any of the words, etc. as well as limiting to specific journalistic outlets or country, state, city. You can include or Exclude outlets as well.
- Search features
- Contact Info
- Tracking inquiries
- better keyword exclusion options
August 07, 2021
Save time and money
Muck Rack is an all in one software service that serves as a media database, pitching software, and clipping service. So, basically takes care of all your important PR needs for daily tasks. They also send out a daily email that keeps you on top of news trends and movers and shakers in journalism.
- Robust media database
- Streamlines pitching
- Keeps you on top of news trends to help with pitching ideas
- Nothing comes to mind
July 07, 2021
Easy and User-Friendly!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Muck Rack to connect with journalists, send pitches, organize our media lists, and create coverage reports.
- Organize pitches
- Easy for beginners
- Media lists are a wonderful tool
- Use whichever email we want even if the journalist decided to hide it
- Have Muck Rack immediately update email addresses
June 07, 2021
Reaching and Engaging with Social Journalists
We use Muck Rack to create media lists based on journalists on social media. Some of the media databases with contact information (mainly phone and email) include outdated contacts. Using Muck Rack is real-time, it allows us to not only identify journalists,not in our media databases, but also usually their LinkedIn and Twitter is more updated than their media database profile so sometimes it's more relevant.
- Identify journalists and influencers not in traditional media databases.
- Understand what journalists are talking about topics relevant to your clients.
- Bios: love being able to search bios, including confirming beats and interests.
- When you export a media list, it does not include the email address so you have to search for it offline or on the journalist's profile. It's annoying.
- Sometimes when you save a list, not all the contacts you marked are saved and you have to do it over.
- There isn't a "click all" button to add all of the contacts to a list. You have to wait until all the people load - which isn't ideal for productivity.
I use Muck Rack primarily for media database, media research, news trend insights, and for media list building. It solves the problem of not having to manually search for contact information of reporters I am looking to reach out to. Otherwise, I would have to harvest manually the contact info from Twitter profiles or the contact pages of the outlets they work at. And often with these, the information is not available or incomplete, so Muck Rack saves time and it's information is accurate.
- always updates media contacts, moves and changes in the media landscape
- Reporter profiles list contact info, social handles, recent articles and Twitter feed
- UI makes it easy to build media lists
- Main issue is that when you import a media list to Excel, the margins get weird and you have to manually adjust the columns and rows so that the data lines up neatly
February 18, 2020
Essential tool for successful PR
[We use Muck Rack for] finding media contacts and building lists and social reports.
- Media contacts
- Alerts
- Missing reporter info
- Missing hispanic publications
August 29, 2018
MuckRack is Better than Any Other Media Database
I use MuckRack to search for media, very detailed searches where we look for key words and other factors. I set up media alerts to monitor target media and client names, or simply for key trends we are following. I rely on MuckRack for backgrounding on inquiries (There are so many bogus companies and scams out there). MuckRack addresses the problem I had with rather lame media databases that didn't get into the social posts of media. It was also more cost effective and I think the information is much more reliable.
- The media alert function is awesome! Google Alerts can't get the detail I need, nor do they filter just for the media. I can set media alerts for particular selection factors such as everyone with "education" as their beat.
- I am liking the notes ability to log interactions with particular media. This helps me not have to track down conversation chains or actions with media.
- The interface screen is modern. I love that if I am running a search in one screen, when I click on a particular person or outlet, it opens ANOTHER screen so that I don't have use the back button. I can open, say 10 people at once and compare their notes.
- I love the PDF summaries from lists. I love the Who shared feature. I LOVE EVERYTHING in MuckRack!
- There is a weird process in the media lists when you add new names to the list. I know it tracks the date they were entered but the sorting is difficult to manage. ...I have to go into that process to give you specific guidance on what should be changed. I'll do that next time I encounter it.
- I wish that there was a better way to search regionally or by DMA rank. I'd like to see the media outlet's circulation numbers on the first screen in a search or allow me to filter.
- I wish there was a better way to see a real difference between registered media and the giant world of contributors and other wonks. Anyone with a commentary gets pulled into the general list yet many contributors are perfect targets for pitches so I don't want to eliminate them by selecting only registered media.
MuckRack has become an important tool for our communications efforts. It helps us build and manage lists of key contacts at other media organizations, and offers an intuitive platform for contacting them to pitch our reporters for media appearances. MuckRack is also a central part of our media monitoring suite, allowing us to track who is sharing our journalism on social media.
- Build custom lists of key figures at media organizations
- Offer a platform for pitching media contacts
- Monitor social media
- Respond to issues or suggestions as they arise
- Clear, intuitive design
- Building out their list of media contacts at smaller local news outlets
January 16, 2018
Muck Rack is a valuable tool for any PR agency or department
We use Muck Rack to find contact information of journalists. We also use it to identify relevant journalists for specific media outreach campaigns. It saves time by providing the information easily, so that we don't have to spend hours searching to find contact details. It is also a well organized database that allows us to use specific key words to identify targets that are ideal for client announcements and more.
- Muck Rack has contact information for a lot of journalists
- It also is easy to use Muck Rack's search feature to find journalists using keywords
- Muck Rack's main area of improvement needed is simply that it lacks contact information for a large chunk of journalists. Anyone from a lesser known publication is usually not included.