Muck Rack vs. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

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

Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.

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

• Talkwalker helps you monitor online mentions so you can stay aware of what's being said about your company. Social listening is more important than ever.
• Talkwalker also helps you delve deeper into the social insights to track patterns and give you data that can be helpful in the future as you plan your marketing efforts.
• Talkwalker is one of the only products like it that incorporates AI and is, according to some, on the cutting edge in its field.

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

• A recent update has made adding filters to the dashboard far more convoluted than necessary.
• Many metrics are displayed as "3.4M", it would be great if you could hover over that number to see the full "3,371,000".
• The tagging feature is buggy and often needs to be done twice to tag the mentions applied in the rule.

Incentivized

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.

Love it! In most cases, Talkwalker is a no-brainer: I can confidently recommend it to clients.

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.

Despite all the functionalities available on the platform, I never felt overwhelmed or confused

Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.

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

They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation.

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

I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.

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

• Having learned how to better leverage the system has resulted in a greater diversity in projects and clients that we didn't have the capabilities to service before, which has in turn increased our visibility to the wider company.
• It has reduced the amount of time it takes to do reporting from traditional desk research and utilizing other monitoring tools.

Incentivized