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Muck Rack

Muck Rack

Overview

What is Muck Rack?

Muck Rack is a public relations offering from Sawhorse Media.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Muck Rack is a versatile tool that caters to various public relations needs, as highlighted by its users. With features like media …
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The standard for PR outreach

10 out of 10
August 09, 2021
We currently rely on Much Rack to identify journalists for outreach as well as potential marketing affiliates. Much Rack's search tools …
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Save time and money

8 out of 10
August 07, 2021
Incentivized
Muck Rack is an all in one software service that serves as a media database, pitching software, and clipping service. So, basically takes …
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Easy and User-Friendly!

10 out of 10
July 07, 2021
We use Muck Rack to connect with journalists, send pitches, organize our media lists, and create coverage reports.
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Pricing

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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
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Product Details

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 TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(33)

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!

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

(1-16 of 16)
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Gordon Dalgleish | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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
Derek D. Ross, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Marymar Martinez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Lincolin-George Eli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Scott Rosenblum | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Jennifer Harrison, APR | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Andrew Bard Epstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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