CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
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Infegy Atlas
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Infegy Atlas is a social monitoring tool that moves beyond simple number counting to providing answers that help researchers better understand consumers through advanced automated analysis of social media.
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.
Infegy Atlas works best when analyzing large datasets - this means it is ideal for large clients, or topics upon which there is a significant volume of discussion. For smaller clients or niche topics, it can be challenging to produce a quantity of data that makes Atlas' analysis valuable. This challenge is common to all monitoring/analysis platforms, however; it's not exclusive to Atlas.
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.
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.
It's a little buggy sometimes, but 90% of the time it's great. This is an issue they're aware of and are working on.
The query interface is awesome except for past queries you've entered. Other tools, like NetBase, have a much better system for tagging and sorting past queries so you can save them for projects. Infegy is working on this as well, I'm told.
Like any space that is constantly changing, they are behind in a couple areas - such as minute-by-minute analysis (which Brandwatch can do), and integration with other major platforms that are non-US-centric, like Weibo (which Brandwatch has), and more sentiment-ready languages (Infegy has 6, NetBase has 9). But in every other factor they are far ahead.
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.
Atlas is reasonably-priced and provides excellent value compared to other enterprise tools in the same space. Moreover, we have an excellent relationship with the Infegy team and are consistently impressed with the high quality of support they provide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We did a deep, thorough survey of each of these tools. Some of my earlier answers have covered the distinction. I would rank the top 5: Infegy Atlas NetBase Synthesio Brandwatch DataRank Part of it is current capabilities, of course, but a big part of it is product direction. Some of these tools do not value Natural Language Processing NEARLY enough, and do not do real work to build NLP based on actual Linguistic Theory (which is surprisingly scientific, by the way), so they just do a little to monitor volume and pretty poor sentiment, call it social listening, and deliver it to enterprise clients. This is true of Radian6, Meltwater, Visible Technologies (which was acquired by Cision recently, hence its inclusion here). Of course, my list above is the enterprise level top 5. If you're looking for small biz solutions check out Mention (formerly social mention) or NUVI if you can scale to the bottom of their tiers.
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.
