Good for the basics, but limited when it comes to deeper dives
August 27, 2019
Good for the basics, but limited when it comes to deeper dives
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
TrendKite
Overall Satisfaction with Cision Communications Cloud
We use Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* to monitor earned media coverage for our brands. Analytics uses it most heavily, but some other teams use it also to provide daily or weekly brand monitoring. We pull metrics such as estimated reach, social shares, and SEO impact in order to provide a picture of campaign performance, and we also use it to monitor competitive coverage and share of voice.
*This review was written near the time Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
*This review was written near the time Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
- Capturing media coverage across the web.
- Providing metrics like readership from an industry-trusted source, SimilarWeb.
- Online chat support.
- The boolean language used is far from standard, and requires a great deal of investment to understand and work with. It is also not as flexible as it should be (no wildcard operators, no ability to specify text case).
- It's too reliant on dashboard output vs. data exports. If you want to do deeper analysis by exporting raw data and manipulating or visualizing it yourself, you're in for a lot of extra work and frustration.
- It's inable to easily track sub-queries within a query, and has very limited ability to customize metrics. Measuring on-message mentions is a big use case for PR, but it's virtually impossible to do this. My team has lost many hours trying to find workarounds due to this gap in functionality.
Social listening tools cover news media to varying degrees. Of these, my favorite is Talkwalker. Its coverage seems to be as comprehensive as Cision's (if there are gaps, I haven't noticed) and the boolean language and tool functionalities are far more advanced, flexible, and intuitive. It's also very convenient to house all the data in one tool, especially since there is always considerable overlap between social listening and media coverage (blogs, etc.) The advantage that Cision Communications Cloud has is that it allows you to pull far into the past without extra costs, and the coverage pulled into the tool is not limited by volume -- something that most social listening tools charge extra for.