Good Value for the Price

Our customer success team was fantastic. It consisted of three individuals who worked together on our various needs. They were very responsive and always happy to help. They even came into our physical office once to meet the team and discuss strategy and our needs. I will say we didn't realize at first how much they would do for us. Therefore, we tried setting up our searches and everything on our own. Then we found out they could set up and manage everything for us. In addition, whenever we wanted a change made, we could call or email them, and they'd make the updates (all the searches are based on boolean queries). I feel like they were pretty hands-off in the beginning to let us self-manage our account/search queries/dashboards/etc. However, once we found out that having them manage it was already included in what we were paying for, we let them know that was our preference, and they became much more involved and hands-on. I think they'll adapt to whatever you prefer and what your needs are. I just wish it had been made more abundantly clear from the very beginning that having them set up and manage everything was an option.

Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform is great for monitoring digital publications. My favorite part of Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform was the Daily Digest emails (again, have your customer success team set these up). Twice a day, I'd get an email that had a wrap-up of our media mentions and top stories from the day. This made it extremely easy to keep up to date on the main topics without having to constantly go into the platform. Additionally, you can set up alerts in case there's a sudden influx of articles or mentions of particular keywords. For instance, one thing we wanted to receive instant alerts on was if there was a bridge or building failure/collapse. Once the customer success team got the initial framework built out, it was easy to go in and make minor updates. Of course, they are always happy to help make the changes if you'd prefer. One thing Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform seemed to lack was the ability to monitor for print-based stories. It was able to pull them in if the article also lived online. But if it was only in print, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform wasn't able to report on it. Therefore, we had to do print-based media monitoring manually. There were also quite a few publications pulled in that lived behind paywalls and we weren't able to actually see or read the articles. I know some of Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform's competitors offer better options for accessing articles behind paywalls. They have agreements with the publications that allow you to see the article since you're a paying subscriber to the media monitoring platform. Additionally, I liked how Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform was able to pull in Twitter mentions and comments. However, I'd advise against using it as your social media monitoring platform, as it doesn't do a great job at pulling in posts from the other social channels. They tried to implement a social listening portion of the platform, but we didn't have much luck when we did the trial of it. Instead, we just stuck with Sprout Social for all of our social listening and monitoring needs. Although, occasionally, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform would pull in tweets that Sprout Social seemed to miss, so it was nice to have all of our bases covered from different angles to make sure we weren't missing anything.