Accurate, comprehensive, and integrated analytics
October 26, 2018
Accurate, comprehensive, and integrated analytics
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
TrendKite
Overall Satisfaction with Cision Communications Cloud
We're using it within the media relations team to gauge Kellogg's share of voice in top tier business media, compared to our 6 competitors. This includes any time the school is profiled, any time our faculty are quoted, etc -- essentially any time where our name is mentioned compared to competitors' names. We obviously weed out press releases, obituaries, job announcements, etc.
We are also using it to slice and dice how many times our name is mentioned in conjunction with priority topics for the organization (e.g., healthcare, artificial intelligence, etc.). And we are comparing that with our peers to see who has the most significant reputation aligned with a specific topic.
Finally, we are collaborating with our donor relations team to set up Cision Communication Cloud (TrendKite)* alerts for every time a prospective donor is mentioned in the news. This will allow the gift officers to ping the prospect with a congratulatory note, providing a nice touchpoint and relationship-builder.
*This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
We are also using it to slice and dice how many times our name is mentioned in conjunction with priority topics for the organization (e.g., healthcare, artificial intelligence, etc.). And we are comparing that with our peers to see who has the most significant reputation aligned with a specific topic.
Finally, we are collaborating with our donor relations team to set up Cision Communication Cloud (TrendKite)* alerts for every time a prospective donor is mentioned in the news. This will allow the gift officers to ping the prospect with a congratulatory note, providing a nice touchpoint and relationship-builder.
*This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
- Accuracy of media monitoring. We had significant accuracy issues with our prior vendor, Cision (pre-TrendKite), which frequently missed clips and then required a laborious customer service process to attempt to reprogram our searches to recover those clips. We haven't run into this issue with Cision (post-TrendKite acquisition).
- Responsiveness of customer service. We have a dedicated rep who always replies to communications quickly with helpful answers or tutorials.
- Ease of use. We can easily create multiple dashboards and add/remove widgets, date ranges, topics, etc. This type of thing would have taken forever and required numerous special project tickets via Cision.
- Onboarding experience. Very helpful to essentially get us playing around in Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* from the start.
- It will be a tremendous value add if your monitoring capabilities can start scraping not only the text of an article, but also the byline (aka, who wrote the article). This would enable us to track op-eds that are written by Kellogg faculty. (Conducting an author search as a workaround does not work -- we need to be able to monitor for the term "Kellogg School" as part of the byline of an article.) This would be a significant value add for our company if this feature was added.
- It would be helpful if you had industry-specific reps who might be able to walk us through a few suggested use cases for the platform, as part of the onboarding phase, to ensure we're really optimizing how we work with Cision Communications Cloud. This could include an education rep who has seen other schools use the platform to do X, Y and Z.
- Cision PR Software, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform and Critical Mention
These other vendors are honestly terrible, based on my interactions with the platforms from 2014-2016, when we were in more of a "test" phase and hopping around from vendor to vendor. In almost all cases:
- their media monitoring is not accurate
- the platforms are not user friendly and require calling customer service in order to make even the most minor of changes
- the reps are either unavailable (directing us instead to the general hotline) or have bad attitudes, particularly in the case of Cision (pre-TrendKite acquisition)
- they may offer media monitoring, analytics capabilities, OR a reporter directory, but not all three
- sales team is overly pushy and constantly leaves spam calls, voicemails and emails -- including tactics that they think are clever (i.e., sounding vague enough to potentially be a serious call and not a sales call) but are actually extremely annoying and not fooling anyone