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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PageLever (discontinued)
Score 7.0 out of 10
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PageLever was an analytics platform for measuring brand presence on Facebook. The company was acquired by Unified Social (now "Unified") in January 2013, and the product is no longer offered separately from the Unified platform.
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.
Pagelever has an amazing team that helps clients get what they need. They understand the needs and are there to help you get the benefits you need from your competitors. In comparison with some other vendors we have worked with, they adopted a true partnership approach. They are very good at listening to what we wish to achieve and then helping us tweak the product to meet our goals. We were initially on the Professional plan and even before we eventually upgraded to the more fully-featured Agency plan, they were very willing to work with us to make sure the product did what we needed it to do. Moving to the Agency plan was great since it gave us additional agency features that were very important such as giving our clients automatic acces to their data and allowing us to set up custom KPIs and custom reports.
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.
It has amazing in depth of data about Facebook Pages. For example, it shows us how exactly content is being consumed over time. We can easily see segmented data showing what content is being consumed by which demographic groups. It's also very easy to incorporate all this data into a a usable report which can be share with our clients.
Analysis with competitive streams: We can compare metrics across client accounts to quickly spot anomalies or see if, for example, low click-through rate is specific to one client, or is common across our account base and possibly due to external factors.
Very easy to use - great usability. The product is quite flexible and we can easily configure custom reports with dashboards and KPIs that are specific to our client's use cases.
Client access: Clients can log-in to the system to see customized reports that we configure specifically for them. This is a huge advantage.
The ability to track changes in metrics over different time periods is also extremely helpful. This is often a key metric for our clients and it is very simple to pul this data from the system.
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.
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.
PageLever is a fantastic product for agencies. The ability to customize and easily share metrics with our clients is key. Many other tools are great for corporate use, but PageLever is a particularly effective tool for agencies working with multiple clients.
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.
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.
Great data that can help a lot in decision making. For example, as the system provides very granular, real-time data we can easily see if certain posts / conntent is resonating with the target deomgraphic group or not. If we are trying to appeal to males between the ages of 35 and 45, it's quite simple to see if our messaging is effective in reaching this group. We can do A/B testing and test different things until we find the content that resonates most strongly with this demographic group.
