Cision PRWeb vs. Meltwater

PRWeb served it's purpose for Strouse by sending news out to new audiences although this never generated an overwhelming amount of traffic to our website. If you are only interested in issuing PR and getting your name out there, then I think PRWeb is a fine solution. I find PRWeb less appropriate if you really want to drive traffic to your site through a press release in hopes of creating sales. During the selection process I would be interested in knowing what sources my PR would be submitted to. Is it being submitted to relevant websites? Will links be provided on all of these websites? Ask yourself, will these websites benefit my companies SEO?

Incentivized

Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.

Incentivized

• It provides a newswire option at a very reasonable price.
• The pricing is in a sweet spot for many startups who would want to use it.
• It hits up all of the key media outlets that you would expect a wire service to be connected to.

Incentivized

• Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
• Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
• Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.

Incentivized

• One issue we ran into with media tracking was that when it came to smaller or more niche media, it had a hard time tracking hits from those outlets for our clients.
• Building larger media lists was time consuming and cumbersome.

Incentivized

• The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
• Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
• TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.

Incentivized

We are unlikely to renew PRWeb because I feel that the costs outweigh the benefits of the service. For a company like ours (small business with about 60 employees) we don't have enough press that warrants monthly coverage. We may look at using PRWeb on an as needed basis, 3-4 times a year for single submissions, but that would be the extent of it. I could see PRWeb being much more beneficial for large companies that are constantly needing to issue press.

Incentivized

Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.

Incentivized

It is a very simple program to use. They walk you step by step on what is necessary to complete a PR.

Incentivized

Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.

I have only required support from PRWeb on two separate occasions and they handled my issues without any problems. I was a bit confused at first not sure if they had received my requests but shortly after I received responses and was able to move forward with my press release.

Incentivized

Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.

Incentivized

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

Implementation of PRWeb required very little of Strouse. It was a quick process and we were almost immediately ready to use the platform.

Incentivized

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

I've used all these services. Which one to choose depends on the situation. It's good to have knowledge of all the options. Of course, there are many other services as well, and even free services that a very small business or nonprofit can use that do similar things. I find PRWeb is a good fit for many of my clients because of the pricing. Photos are increasingly important in getting news picked up and PRWeb doesn't charge you an arm and a leg like some services do to include a photo

Incentivized

I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.

Incentivized

• It was definitely a cost decision for us, but the ability to have access to their media database was by far the most useful and needed tool for us.
• For tracking media hits, it saved us time tracking the majority of hits. Where it didn't save us time was with smaller, more niche media.

Incentivized

• As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
• We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
• Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.

Incentivized