Critical Mention vs. Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)

Critical Mention is excellent for media monitoring across platforms including TV, radio and online. It is easy to grab and tailor video clips and share. The reporting function makes creating thorough reports simple. Most importantly, the customers service is unparalleled. Any time I've ever had a question or challenge, it has been handled quickly. I would suggest that you make sure to take the time to thoroughly set up your searches to be sure you don't miss anything.

Incentivized

It's well suited if you are in a situation where you need control of the content that is published out to your channels. It provides complete trackability for every action taken by each member of staff when working with the system so you can always know who was overall responsible for any decision that was made. It's less suited to small businesses that have limited social media presence. It is very slow on being kept up to date with the native platform and the lack of ability to schedule the same post multiple times is frustrating

Incentivized

• Monitor media mentions and send alerts: it's great because I don't have to go in and search every day. I am set in the morning and afternoon with alerts.
• Online media reports: it's great because it helps me create my own personal reports in a format that my clients love.
• Customer service: our account team dedicated to us is amazing. There has never been a time that they let us down.

Incentivized

• Ease of reporting. Allows us to pull reports by network or by campaign quickly. This used to be a manual process that would take upwards of 8 hours per month.
• Real-time social media monitoring, with virtually no spam. Other providers struggle to remove spam content from their social monitoring results which makes sifting through mentions cumbersome.
• Integration into other tools. Being able to integrate other Oracle products like Eloqua and web analytics like Omniture helps us see social media content as part of our larger pipeline now.

Incentivized

• The media database was not as robust as our proprietary one, it contained a key journalist that had been dead for 3 years for example, others that retired or moved to other outlets. Its influencer list was dismal. Fortunately when I complained (which I did the first time I used it) they removed it from our subscription and did not charge us. They said we could add the updates or add our contacts - not sure why they thought someone would pay for a service and then give valuable information to the company that would then be shared with competitors. They removed it from our bill so that at least was positive.
• It only tracks hashtags across social media accounts that have been added to its system. Right from the beginning, just by running a hashtag search on IG, we could see missing posts. They said we could add all those in batches or manually one at a time which was work we were hoping to avoid with this subscription. Basically, it becomes a service that prepares nice-looking reports, not one that monitors mentions on public accounts.
• They should allow a trial demo period.

• Tabs tool could be much more user friendly, i.e. completely "drag and drop". It was pretty easy to get something functional built, but if you didn't know how to code CSS then you were pretty much hopeless when it came to making the tab look "professional".
• Their bulk uploading/scheduling feature for posts was always having issues, it was something I always wanted to take advantage of and was bummed that it didn't really work well enough to make it efficient.
• When I was using the tool, it was a very janky user experience when you needed to go and locate a post or comment that had been automatically removed due to keyword filters. And there was no simple way to just view a stream of what's being said on/to your accounts.

I gave this a 5 only because I do not make the decisions to renew. When I used this at my previous company, I also recommended to the decision maker to renew this tool as it was a crucial piece to the overall client objective

Incentivized

Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.

It's great for quickly looking up a specific clip, but this platform makes it difficult to select and accurately report on a high volume of clips

Incentivized

Within a few hours you should be able to get up to speed to do the basics. I find it very intuitive

Incentivized

Look, Critical Mention follows up on an or phone call immediately or in the AM the following business day. I have called them after hours and get a live person to work through any issues that may have come up. Support seems to be job one with Critical Mention.

Incentivized

The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies

Incentivized

Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.

Critical Mention implementation was easy and fast. Their support and training were awesome.

Incentivized

I am not one to bash a competition product, but I have used several other similar products from different vendors. It has mostly been a disaster. Poor customer service to poor software interface has led me to Critical Mention. It's the first time I have ever stayed with a product beyond one year. One company only ever reached out to me when it was time for a renewal despite repeated reach-outs on my part during the year.

Incentivized

We started our social marketing journey by just using the free version of Hootsuite. It had good listening but was limited in other areas, especially as it related to campaign tracking and some analytics. Even looking at the Enterprise versions, we didn't feel it had the breadth of functionality as Oracle SRM.

Incentivized

• Every week the department I am a part does dozens of searches on Critical Mention. We use it as our primary search engine for all things broadcast.
• One negative aspect is that we do not know where Critical Mention gets their audience viewing numbers from so we just have to take it as their word.
• Another negative aspect is that we are limited on the amount of time that one clip can be so we have to share several clips of the same show with our clients.

Incentivized

• Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
• Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
• Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.

Incentivized