TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Critical Mention

Score7.5 out of 10

30 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Critical Mention are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Critical Mention is a versatile platform that offers a wide range of use cases for its users. Organizations and individuals heavily rely on Critical Mention to monitor their brand's media mentions across various platforms, including TV, radio, print, and social media. This allows them to stay informed about their brand's reputation and track the impact of their marketing efforts. Users can also review competitors and other schools to see their mentions in the news, enabling them to gather insights and benchmark their performance.

Teams within organizations find great value in Critical Mention as it enables them to provide relevant television and radio clips to clients. They can easily measure coverage volume on specific topics, helping them gauge their media presence and track the success of their campaigns. By creating alerts based on keywords, users can save time and avoid the need for daily searches.

Critical Mention goes beyond monitoring by offering features for managing and analyzing specific interviews conducted on TV, radio, and online media outlets worldwide. Users can easily edit videos, assign tags and metadata, and analyze coverage through features like word clouds and graphs. The platform provides essential information such as audience numbers, air dates and times, and ad values, offering comprehensive insights into media coverage.

One of the standout features of Critical Mention is its ability to locate broadcast coverage that users wouldn't be able to view on their own. It captures segments from multiple outlets, saving users the effort of individually searching for coverage across different channels. This makes it an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to compile a comprehensive picture of their media mentions.

Furthermore, Critical Mention serves as a centralized location for all news clips, allowing users to store and edit clips to present to executives as a reflection of their media relations efforts. The platform facilitates the process of tracking and documenting media coverage for organizations and foundations. It is particularly useful for marketing departments looking to monitor media coverage, reputation, and compile reports for boards and leadership teams.

In addition to traditional media monitoring, Critical Mention also excels in monitoring social media presence across multiple platforms. This ensures that users have thorough coverage of mentions and can track their brand's visibility in the digital landscape. The platform is crucial for media monitoring, search, editing, and compiling functions in public relations.

Research departments find great value in Critical Mention as it allows them to capture and analyze interviews and television segments. The platform's features provide a user-friendly experience, making it easy to navigate and effectively utilize its capabilities. Reviewers have praised this software for streamlining order management processes and improving efficiency in fulfilling customer orders.

Overall, Critical Mention serves as a comprehensive solution for media monitoring, analysis, and management across various channels. It caters to the needs of organizations ranging from marketing departments monitoring media coverage to research teams analyzing interviews and television segments. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, it has garnered positive feedback from users, reviewers, and customers alike.

Reviews

21 Reviews

Push for "Try before you buy" with this one

Rating: 1 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We original purchased Critical Mention for client campaigns that incorporated traditional and social media. We wanted to beef up our media lists without having a coordinator do the research manually and produce accurate media reports that would put a $ value for those clients that request it. For social we wanted to track a hashtag for a campaign we were putting into market. We did a demo with a sales manager and they reassured us that it would do all that. They don't allow you a trial period - we purchased it based on the assurances of the sales team.

Pros

  • Respond to questions.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is not suited for campaign tracking unless you already have the social handles, websites, media etc. of every account that may publicly use the hashtag or company name/mentions you are tracking and add them to the accounts they follow.
CF
Cara Ferguson
Chief Firestarter in Marketing at edana integrated marketing (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
View profile

Fair and good

Rating: 5 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This is a very good app to increase and track your engagement on social media influencer marketing and brand but I would like if they can add free pricing. However, it is one of the best apps ever.

Pros

  • Track your names
  • Track your hashtags
  • And portfolio

Cons

  • It should include free
  • And premium

Likelihood to Recommend

It keeps on bringing the same thing over and over again where you have no mention when you are trying to join or sign up for an account. Please improve on that, need urgent touch otherwise, people are bored to sign up for an account on your website or app.
MM
Michael Muyembe
Senior Account Manager in Marketing at Klinheals Brand ambassador (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Reseller
Critical Mention
1 year of experience
View profile

Efficient Channel for Social Coverage and Mentions.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Critical Mention is the program we significantly use to monitor our brand's presence in various social sites, and the way we are fairing. This tool is our marketing guide, but we also use it to obtain the reports from most of the interactive sites and platforms including televisions. Critical Mention ensures we do not spend a lot of time, as it offers coverage to us, with minimal engagement or work on our end.

Pros

  • Gives us a chance to respond to comments on most of the social platforms.
  • Works efficiently with Google for accurate analytical report.
  • Extract contact details from the social sites for the company.

Cons

  • Inadequate training options.
  • Tiresome download of watermark.
  • Exclude most of the local social media platforms.

Likelihood to Recommend

Critical Mention offers quick mention or updates on social media, provides/generates reports about our brand on these social sites, and quickly identifies and informs us about the missing opportunities. Again, Critical Mention has excellent monitoring of the client's content like clips and videos, and tracking of the broadcast coverage. Finally, Critical Mention acts as an advanced and digital marketing solution.
LT
Linda Torkelson
Director, Marketing & Communications in Marketing at Copa Health (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
2 years of experience

Critical Mention delivers accurate and impressive tracking for Broadcast TV

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to monitor earned media hits on broadcast Television, both national and local. Having used other broadcast tracking services, Critical Mention is both the most user-friendly and most effective service at monitoring and tracking ad equivalency & viewership. Our entire agency depends on it to track media broadcast hits. It's also super easy to go to / track specific dates & times when clients are on various shows.

Pros

  • Tracking
  • Ad Equivalency
  • Viewership Approximation

Cons

  • For monitoring broadcast TV is fantastic -- nothing better. We don't use it for monitoring radio very often but have found that it's more difficult to track local radio hits through Critical Mention. It typically will track bigger national radio hits, but it's not as intuitive as the broadcast tracks.

Likelihood to Recommend

For tracking broadcast TV, it's awesome.
For tracking broadcast radio, it's not quite as intuitive.
VU
Verified User
Director in Marketing (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
7 years of experience

Critical Mention Delivers

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Critical Mention to monitor the media mentions of our university across TV, radio, print, and social media. It is vital that we keep track of our mentions and react to any negative items. I get alerts sent to me three times each day, and also have an immediate alert set up when our university president is managed. I can also set up to review other schools to see what they are being mentioned for in the news.

Pros

  • Daily Alerts-Important so you don't necessarily have to log in to see all the mentions
  • Immediate Alerts-Great when you need to know if/when someone is mentioned
  • Monetary value-it is very helpful to have a dollar value attached to the earned media hits.

Cons

  • Duplicate mentions-Would love to cut out the duplicate mentions that sometimes pop up.
  • Phone App-Would love an app for phone
  • Word Play-Sometimes using the word play feature is hard to use.

Likelihood to Recommend

Critical Mention is great for schools/businesses/etc. that want to know when they are in the news. Sometimes a brand's reputation can suffer greatly if you are not aware of an issue that was posted by a competitor or media outlet If you are not in the news a lot, there is no need for this product.
TM
Tom McGuire
Director Of Communications (and Media Relations) in Marketing at Bloomsburg University (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
3 years of experience
View profile

Good option for quick results

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Critical Mention is used to monitor our social media presence across multiple platforms. It is used primarily in marketing, but other areas also request reports as needed. It saves us time and provides more thorough coverage of our mentions with less work on our part. It is user and budget friendly, so it meets our needs.

Pros

  • Allows us to identify any negative or neutral comments and respond appropriately
  • Integrates with Google to provide more accurate analytics
  • Provides contact information when it is needed for media sources

Cons

  • Clunky download of clips/watermarks
  • Limited training options to make the best use
  • Some media outlets, especially local ones, are not included (e.g., smaller radio networks)

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for quick updates on media mentions, reporting to upper levels how our brand is mentioned, quickly assimilating social media presence and missing opportunities. There are many features we are not particularly well trained on and so we are missing some options due to a lack of understanding of what they entail. Overall, it is useful.
VU
Verified User
Program Manager in Marketing (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
5 years of experience

Critical Mention is expensive but gets the job done

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Critical Mention to monitor our media mentions and use their reporting tool to deliver media reports to our board and leadership team.

Pros

  • Easy to use.
  • Easy to clip media files to the perfect size
  • Easy to build media reports to send to executives
  • User Interface is intuitive

Cons

  • Does not get all mentions. Misses some that aren't posted to websites.

Likelihood to Recommend

[Critical Mention is] excellent at grabbing your mentions IF they are online. Can miss the ones that are just mentions and aren't posted online.
NE
Nile Easton
Dir. of Communications at Unified Fire Authority (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
2 years of experience

The quickest, easiest and most intuitive platform for Media Monitoring

Rating: 10 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Critical Mention to stay on top of Media Coverage for our clients.

Pros

  • Quick and easy to use platform
  • Stellar Customer Service
  • Best TV coverage in the industry

Cons

  • Radio tracking text can be jumbled - hard to find info. This is industry-wide.

Likelihood to Recommend

Once you sign up for the platform you're up and running right away. You have ONE contact that you can reach out to right away for help. Customer service is the best in the business. The true test of a media monitoring company is not how well they do when everything is going well - it's how well they respond when things are not going well. Critical Mention has shined in this scenario - getting issues handled quickly and efficiently.
DS
David Steiner
Executive Director Media Analysis at August II Productions (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
6 years of experience

Critical Mention is the Solution You're Looking For!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our marketing department uses Critical Mention for media monitoring. It helps us to keep a pulse on our reputation and any mentions in the news. We also use it to compile reports for our Board of Governors to show our earned media. It allows us to search and track and then download video clips to share with other staff or our Board.

Pros

  • Critical Mention's customer service is excellent. Any time we've had a challenge finding a clip or anything, they are on top of it and go above and beyond to make sure we have what we are looking for quickly.
  • The ability to create tailored clips of each mention and quickly share them is unparalleled.
  • The reporting feature is fantastic. It makes it very simple to pull detailed reports and share them with interested parties.

Cons

  • The transcription is sometimes unreliable, which can make it a challenge to track mentions if you don't know exactly when/where they are.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
2 years of experience

Critical Mention Is Critical to Our Company

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Critical Mention for a variety of companies we work with to answer the question, how far is their message traveling and to where. I worked previously for a very large state government and we used it across the entire organization which included 26 departments and thousands of employees. Now I use it for my own company and our partners and it works well for both applications.

Pros

  • Critical Mention has been a useful tool over the past dozen years. We have used it to help political campaigns, non-profits, private business and the like to understand where their message is landing and understand if they are hitting their target audience. Our report shows them real-time results for radio, tv, online and even social media.
  • I believe the Critical Mention reporting and reports are far superior to other tracking products we have observed by other in the past.
  • Their online services and support are awesome and when you are looking for a product and value of the product Critical Mention gives you both in one package.

Cons

  • I believe the one frustration I have with searching in general that if the closed captioning is not correct on the broadcast end Critical Mention will miss that data. Which is not a Critical Mention issue and does overcome depending on the search. Also, it would be great if you wanted to capture a complete 30 minutes newscast, it could be done by using the search. The clips need to be about to handle 30-minute programs.
  • One nagging issue when using Critical Mention is that it does not save e-mail addresses when sending a report and this requires a waste of time having to type in e-mails that should be able to be pulled from the customers' contacts.
  • Also, it would be great if you wanted to capture a complete 30 minutes newscast, it could be done by using the search. The clips need to be able to handle 30-minute programs.

Likelihood to Recommend

Look, Critical Mention is the best on the market for the price and value at this moment and every moment, in the last twelve years. I would give a 100% thumbs up to folks who want a professional software and service to handle their broadcast and online tracking needs. Nothing is perfect but Critical Mention is damn close when it comes to our and our clients' tracking needs.
JK
Jerry Kambic
Owner & CEO in Corporate at Jerkami Communications Group, LLC (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Critical Mention
12 years of experience
View profile