Critical Mention headquartered in New York offers their eponymous media monitoring platform for public relations and crisis management.
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Prezly
Score 9.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Prezly is presented as all-in-one public relations management tool that helps PR teams organise their workflow, collaborate and save time. Accessible through any browser, Prezly's key features are divided between three main areas: Contact management Full PR CRM for managing contacts Automated contact enrichment and flagging for out-of-date contact details At-a-glance comms timeline per contact showing emails sent/received, added…
$50
per month per user
Pricing
Critical Mention
Prezly
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter Plan
$50
per month per user
Core Plan
$90
per month per user
Premium Plan
$140
per month per user
Enterprise Plan
custom
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Critical Mention
Prezly
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
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Prezly also offers a yearly payment option with a 20% discount. Additional seats are available for each plan, and additional newsrooms are available for Core Plan and above. For larger/global clients, Prezly offers an Enterprise Plan that accommodates 10+ seats and more customizable functionality; Enterprise Plans are priced based on an organization's requirements.
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.
Since this platform is so easy to use when creating or managing communication workflows, it is recommended to work mostly with scenarios that generally require several processes to complete each group management, for example, to cover from the follow-up of employees within the communications team to the management of the team's communication processes.
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.
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.
Prezly's platform tends to constantly present slowness issues if you are going to work with external flows coming from other platforms, usually while they are loading, or it can lead to the platform itself stopping its use. Our recommendation to deal with this is to simply copy the workflows inside Prezly, without using the original formats.
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
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.
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.
It's been a while since I evaluated Prezly against Cision. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison because Cision has a lot of additional features, but Prezly has a robust CRM platform and digital newsroom that outflanks the Cision newsroom in look, feel and ease of use, not to mention cost. It has been several years since I did the comparison, so the Cision offerings may have changed in the meantime, to be fair.
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.
The biggest ROI is in time saved. when sending press releases before Prezly, I used merge emails in Outlook. It took 3-5 hours to refine my list, set up the outlook page, host links of assets, and then run test sends. Prezly can be set up and a release or distribution sent out in 1-2 hours (even less if we copy a previous set up).
Prezly makes my website press room look amazing. Many media comment on the Prezly press kits I send along and appreciate that the pages are clean, easy to navigate and reliable.
It is essential to have a contact management system with an opt-out.
