Cision - Helping PR Professionals Everywhere Achieve the Right Vision for their Pitch!
March 21, 2017
Cision - Helping PR Professionals Everywhere Achieve the Right Vision for their Pitch!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cision PR Software
One of the main things our department (Public Relations) does at HMSHost is work to generate press by reaching out to local and national media. We open new restaurants frequently (some proprietary brands entirely created by us, some well-known national brands, and some local chef-driven brands) and when we introduce new concepts especially we pitch them to media. The type of media depends on the brand but Cision plays a huge role in the process of finding individual media contacts that we need.
- User-friendly. Allows you to export lists in different forms depending on what you need them for.
- Covers a wide spectrum of media outlets (picks up a huge variety from obscure blogs to television networks to traditional print outlets).
- Provides the option to filter your search down to some very detailed criteria. The advanced search has many options to choose from to narrow your search and find the exact type of contacts you need/want to target.
- Some outlets slip through the cracks and aren't picked up by Cision. This is to be expected though.
- Sometimes I don't find the "outlet topics" to be accurate. Only on certain occasions though. I'll have personal knowledge of an outlet and see that it is labeled as having a huge list of topics rather than it's main ones. Sometimes makes publications come up inaccurately in searches.
- A few instances where the contacts are out of date (i.e. didn't work at the publication anymore).
- Has made targeting the correct media publications a breeze. This is a tool we use almost every single time we pitch and since finding the right contacts can be the hardest part this makes that process monumentally easier.
- Has allowed us to foster relationships with both restaurant industry AND travel sector contacts who would be interested in our business.
I know Meltwater has a similar service as a part of its core function which is to monitor media presence. We use Meltwater to monitor HMSHost coverage but we don't really use the media list component because we find Cision to be so user-friendly and quite frankly it's what we are used to.