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.
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Meltwater
Score 8.0 out of 10
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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.)
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.
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I do research outside the platform, as well, to be sure to be thorough (and some of the info in the database is outdated).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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
