Cronycle, from the company of the same name in London, is a SaaS application that provides an end-to-end collaborative information workflow for content curation, monitoring, organization, and publishing, for knowledge workers.
$49
per month per user
Meltwater
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Meltwater Media Intelligence platform is a set of public relations software tools for media monitoring, social media monitoring, and collecting brand insights. The four areas of functionality are Monitor, Analyze, Distribute, and Engage. (Note that this product combines features from the vendor Meltwater's former Buzz, Press, and News products.)
Prior to adopting Cronycle, our research team had a variety of different ways in which they would discover, store and share information. These methods were often inconsistent, with many smaller teams or sub-groups of researchers operating independently of others. In many cases, content that was potentially useful to more than one colleague was not being shared at all. We had thousands of different sources, accessed through varying methods and stored in different locations/systems, and very few colleagues would have had an idea of which sources other team members were using. Furthermore, we became aware as a team that while between us we were pulling in a lot of information, much of what was being discovered was not necessarily being acted upon, or indeed being read by the colleague to whom it was most relevant. We also needed to become more targeted, and indeed more selective, in the information we were seeing, and Cronycle -specifically through the Sources Library, the Feeds, and the tagging and notification functionality - has enabled us to do just this. There has been a genuinely transformative outcome to our information gathering ability, borne out by specific metrics, which Cronycle has also provided us with via the Enterprise account.
If you practice media relations in your role, Meltwater is helpful. You can do research to find relevant publications and journalists, build media lists, export them to share with a team or client and you can also keep notes on your campaigns. I like using it for research, although I do research outside the platform, as well, to be sure to be thorough (and some of the info in the database is outdated). I would say if you don't practice media relations, it's probably not as useful. There are other tools that do a better job if you want to search for media or social media mentions, for example. If you are looking for an all-in-one media relations tool that's relatively easy to use, Meltwater is probably a good fit.
For some reason logging on for a few months does not go as easy as usual, because nowadays I need a least two attempts to log in.
I think I do only use the core functionality of Cronycle: getting indication info by keywords via multiple sites.
Vice versa: if people come to me with a suspected issue, I double-check via Cronycle by entering that issue as search in found results. A low occurrence often indicates the suspected issue likely is not so severe.
Their tracking system for media mentions isn't perfect - we have stumbled across several posts mentioning our company/product that were not picked up by the platform. While frustrating, we send these URLs to our rep and their tech team ensures that that website will be monitored moving forward.
We have had great success with Meltwater Buzz the past 2 years. The reporting has been great for our board reports, seeing the conversations going on between our followers helps us to learn who our audience is and what we can do better on our social media. The analytics we see on Meltwater Buzz we could not get anywhere else
Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.
Any issues with the platform have always been resolved quickly. I have never previously worked with a third party software provider whose support team is as responsive.
Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.
Hootsuite publication prep and scheduling is great, better than Cronycl (a manual process) Cronycl management of feeds, filtering creation of topical boards are excellent, Hootsuite doesn't offer this. Cronycle I find it easier, more attractive, and better filtering than Buffer, though Buffer was slightly better at the publication prep.
Meltwater serves as an all-in-one platform, so it has benefitted us greatly in being able to service a variety of needs in one place. Having a streamlined platform is important to our team since it can feel counterproductive to visit a variety of products to service one client's needs. So, Meltwater has been essential in ensuring our needs are met through one destination.
In the past issues sometimes overcame us which caused stressful situations because at that moment an investigation, implementation, and deployment had to occur asap. Cronycle allows use to be aware of issues in an early stage and hence have more structured and less stressful investigation/implementation/deployment cycles.
A great ability to track the news and understand particular news drivers for certain industries, allowing us to get our client in front of the media at or before the perfect moment.
