Muck Rack

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.

• Media research for building media lists.
• Media coverage tool for reporting.
• Those are the only two things Muck Rack does.

• Extracting ourselves from the contract during the six-month on-ramp period, after learning of Muck Rack's shortcomings, cost senior members of our team hours of otherwise billable time.
• There also was a cost to our broader team to learn a new platform that we ultimately did not wind up using.
• It cost many billable hours to do redundant work in order to learn that Muck Rack was not a good solution for us.

Cision Communications Cloud, PRWeb, Critical Mention and TVEyes

Cision Communications Cloud, QuickBooks Desktop for Mac, Critical Mention

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.

• Media List development
• Pitch/press release distribution
• Tracking and reporting

• Muck Rack has really helped to capture the impact of public relations with clients who don't always understand the impact of media, so I've been able to increase my budgets by 15 - 25% since using Muck Rack accordingly to support those efforts.
• I've been able to hire more team members as a result of those increased PR budgets Muck Rack helped to drive.
• I've been able to allocate continued education with access to Muck Rack's academy, insight reports, etc. to stay ahead of the curve with PR best practices and industry evolvement, so that pours back into the ROI because my team and I are able to stay ahead of the latest and greatest skills and thought leadership.

Cision PRWeb

Adobe Acrobat DC, Hootsuite, Buffer

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.

• Credibility - which currently they are lacking, in my opinion
• Responsiveness - which currently they have not shown, in my opinion
• Accountability & ownership - which is not in their vocabulary, in my opinion

• I feel they damaged my credibility by consistently sending emails to persons who have specifically asked to unsubscribe because our business does not match their interests

Salesforce CMS, Pardot, Apollo

I currently use Muck Rack to:

<ul><li>Identify journalists to pitch on behalf of my company</li><li>Share notes with others in my company on my conversations with journalists</li><li>Set ownership of relationships with journalists to help my colleagues identify who I can pitch on their behalf </li><li>Update contact information based on my relationship with journalists </li><li>Set monitoring alerts on topics I am following</li></ul>

• Easily identifiable and frequently updated contact information
• Notes section that is available for all employees of my organization to see
• Journalist's media coverage section

• Muck Rack has helped us increase our response rate.
• Helped us increase our feature story rate.

Cision PRWeb

Talkwalker, monday.com

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.

• Journalist contacts
• Outlet information
• Media list building
• Twitter information about contacts

• It has a positive ROI on business because we spend less time building media lists than before and are able to build more curated lists.

Cision PRWeb, Cision Communications Cloud and Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

Signal AI, BuzzSumo, Microsoft Teams