Cision Communications Cloud vs. Muck Rack

For a small start-up, the cost-benefit to add lift to press releases [and] particular milestone accomplishments is definitely there with the Cision [Communications] Cloud. Much of what we do, by necessity, is done internally without the benefit of outsourced press folks, so the Cision [Communications] Cloud ease of use and reporting is very important.

Incentivized

Muck Rack has the potential to be a very powerful tool that can improve PR agency efficiency across the board. The death knell for Muck Rack, and the reason why we terminated our contract early, was that they offered a complimentary six-month on-ramp to win our business. In other words, we had six full months to use Muck Rack while we were still using the other two vendors' products. Multiple team members compared results head-to-head for a wide range of our clients and Muck Rack simply did not stack up. That six-month overlap period proved to be very eye-opening and enabled us to reveal what we found to be severe limitations in terms of the quality of the database and the quality of the reporting.

Incentivized

• Influencer research: I am able to quickly find the right reporter or editor for my pitch because Cision lets me know what they write about, their communications preferences, past articles, etc.
• Distribution: I appreciate a template to help streamline my pitch and press release distribution that allows me to send my news to a targeted list of contacts without having to send individual emails. I can send out communications with just a few steps, in just a few minutes.
• News search: I use Cision to scan for news and monitor for mentions of my clients. I also use this feature to keep tabs on topics and key terms of interest to me and my clients to stay ahead of emerging trends and stay on top of emerging discussions in my clients' industries.

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!

Incentivized

• The social component could be upgraded to more accurately collect metrics on ephemeral content.
• Social listening is done in a completely different program than the media monitoring - combining the two would make report creation much easier and allow for a fuller picture of an incident across traditional and social media on the built-in dashboard section.
• Social listening only tracks Twitter. Public Facebook comments would be key in seeing a fuller picture of how an incident or campaign is playing out on social media.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

For all of the reasons I had mentioned before, I haven't found a product that surpasses what they offer. I will maintain renewing with them for a few years and then reexamine the market to see if any new competitors arise. Until then, I have no reason to leave them for someone else.

It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.

The flexibility and customization of Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* is among its most important features. Changing the dashboards, using keywords in the saved searches to pull out the best stories and the integration with marketing automation tools gives me confidence that I will able to continue using this tool well into the future. The future implementation and integration of the media contact database will complete the suite, making list management and email marketing programs much smoother. *This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.

Incentivized

Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.

Easily accessible 24/7.

Incentivized

Generally, Cision performs well day to day, but it's got some annoying bugs that slow down usage/require user workarounds which is inefficient. More seriously, a few months ago, as a result of a major system upgrade, certain critical functionality was not working and I was unable to use the service for more than a day when I had time-sensitive work to execute

For Cision TrendKite in particilar, support always responded, but it was sometimes slow. For some of our booleans and search queries, we would need help refining and excluding terms/phrases that weren't relevant to our client or campaign. This sometimes took 1-2 days just to get a response back, which sometimes was too late when a last-minute report was due. This was only with the support staff, not necessarily our customer success manager or sales rep.

Incentivized

Any time I have had an issue or a question about something on the platform, someone on the chat now function has always answered within 10 mins at most! Everyone I have worked with has been extremely friendly and quick to solve. There is never the inconvenience of having to call, talk to a robot, or deal with an automated email. Customer service is extremely personal and each account also has a designated account manager to oversee the relationship

Incentivized

The online training sessions available for the Cision Communications Cloud are helpful and informative. There's more than one option - initially, I signed up for the live webinar classes on basic functions and that is what I recommend other new users do as well. If I have specific questions or something I want to learn more about, I can search the online database and find article or online training videos to get the information I need.

Incentivized

There is no implementation at the customer's end so this doesn't really apply to my instance of Cision (possibly to all instances of it).

I was not involved with the implementation.

I found Cision [Communications Cloud] to be much more simple to use, and it offers the ability to track [a] wider array of media placements without additional fees attached to it. Now that it has incorporated TVEyes, it can offer print, online, radio, and TV tracking nationwide. This is [crucial] because very often your institution or company could be referenced in a variety of ways, nationally or briefly, on local TV/radio, and you would have no way of knowing about it.

Incentivized

I previously used Cision PRWeb. It was a good service, but for what I needed it wasn't as affordable and I also found the backend system difficult to navigate and manage. I loved the ease of use and the ability to find out what I needed almost immediately once I logged into Muck Rack. Because I have to think so much already, having a platform that takes the weight off having to do a lot of extra research and ask questions to just use the system effectively and efficiently is a gift.

Incentivized

Easy to use, but still room for improvement.

Incentivized

• It seems as though media pickups have overall been down this year, perhaps related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Cision Communications Cloud has enabled us to develop numerous localized media lists for press releases, especially on grant recipients. These localized press releases have generated the best pickups that go beyond our KPIs (key performance indicators).
• The ability to save media lists provide a great starting point for developing future lists. The "talking about" helps to see what media contacts are talking about, and whether they might potentially be interested in our news release.

Incentivized

• Muck Rack has paid for itself, as the ability to access its media database is essential to the media relations work I do on behalf of my client. By having access, it helps me make strategic choices of which media to pitch for what and when, which ultimately leads to positive client placements in key articles. This in turn leads to happy clients!

Incentivized