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.)
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Viralheat (Discontinued)
Score 5.1 out of 10
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Viralheat was acquired by Cision in 2015 and rebranded Cision Social Edition. It was later discontinued.
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I do research outside the platform, as well, to be sure to be thorough (and some of the info in the database is outdated).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.
Viralheat is great for those who have to report back with hard numbers or proof backing a specific campaign or initiative. If this is important to you, make sure you ask to see examples for the monitoring and reporting features. Also, the amount of monitoring you do will impact your quote, so have that information in mind.
Simplicity: The software is very easy to use and took very little time to start optimizing my social media campaigns.
Set up time: I was up and running in no time. With social media you cannot wait days or weeks to get started. By having a quick start up process, it allowed me to get started ASAP.
Reporting: The foundation of all business decisions has been a very tedious process in the past. By using Viralheat, I save time on reporting and have better reports to give more actionable insights.
Data: Not only is the reporting awesome, there are many more insights you can get by using the large amount of demographic data that is in the software.
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.
Some trouble that we ran into with Viralheat was with the daylight savings time change. All the posts that we previously scheduled out before the daylight savings ended up coming out late an hour. I thought Viralheat should have fixed this on their end and should have reached out to their clients about the time change and to tell us if we needed to change anything on our end.
I also want to see Pinterest and Instagram soon on Viralheat. I know this component is not entirely up to Viralheat, but seeing that Pinterest and Instagram are a big part of the social media game, I think scheduling out posts for both these platforms would benefit alot of community managers.
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
There are no other tools out there that offer an equivalent level of functionality for the cost. We continue to monitor the space to see if we can find a tool that includes paid digital marketing analytics, but all tools that include this functionality are 3-5x the cost. Viralheat continues to be the best value.
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.
I found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.
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.
The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.
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.
We selected Viralheat for a number of reasons but the biggest factors were because it had the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) for the features available and the fact that we only had to purchase one tool. During the selection process we demoed with a handful of other SMM tools but realized that we would need to purchase two or more subscriptions if we wanted to get what Viralheat was offering in one.
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.
