Helixa Discovery, from Helixa in New York, is the company's core analytics engine that equips users with the tools to understand what’s distinctive about any audience and what they care about.
N/A
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.)
Users have to be upfront with clients on where Helixa is pulling data from or they could get the wrong idea about the insights. Helixa pulls from a number of sources to gain insight but may not specifically be from the owned channel social audience. By using total social view, you can potentially get the audience data for your Twitter channel which can add specificity to your insights but they can differ from the overall consumer audience. Helixa is best used as a starting point, a place to get ideas and pull supporting data to understand patterns in behavior about an audience. I would not necessarily take its word as gospel, just one piece of a larger insight. My favorite section are the opinions as they show what is most important to the specific audience and can really help get the wheels turning. My least favorite section are the influencer categories. From my experience with Helixa, the influencers tend to skew political and mainstream which is not necessarily what clients are looking for when trying to understand what kind of people are influencing audiences. I also mind that Helixa pulls in a lot of unnecessary social apps like Flickr or Foursquare which are hardly used anymore.
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I do research outside the platform, as well, to be sure to be thorough (and some of the info in the database is outdated).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.
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.
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.
Helixa is just a completely different beast entirely. Where other consumer research boils down their insights into reports, Helixa allows you to go through audience data with a fine tooth comb, also providing the opportunity for direct comparison across different brands or demographic groups. While we did pick Helixa, I can’t emphasize the need for making Helixa one tool in a tool box. While Mintel was a tool we considered that was similar-ish, we also use Mintel now to help complement Helixas insights
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.
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.
