Muck Rack has the potential to be a very powerful tool that can improve PR agency efficiency across the board. The death knell for Muck Rack, and the reason why we terminated our contract early, was that they offered a complimentary six-month on-ramp to win our business. In other words, we had six full months to use Muck Rack while we were still using the other two vendors' products. Multiple team members compared results head-to-head for a wide range of our clients and Muck Rack simply did not stack up. That six-month overlap period proved to be very eye-opening and enabled us to reveal what we found to be severe limitations in terms of the quality of the database and the quality of the reporting.
PR Newswire is well suited for organizations with a significant public relations budget that want to quickly disseminate a news release over the wire to a specific targeted group of recipients. It's probably not a suitable solution for smaller companies or "boutique" public relations agency unless the distribution cost is to be directly passed on to the client because it is quite expensive.
The media alert function is awesome! Google Alerts can't get the detail I need, nor do they filter just for the media. I can set media alerts for particular selection factors such as everyone with "education" as their beat.
I am liking the notes ability to log interactions with particular media. This helps me not have to track down conversation chains or actions with media.
The interface screen is modern. I love that if I am running a search in one screen, when I click on a particular person or outlet, it opens ANOTHER screen so that I don't have use the back button. I can open, say 10 people at once and compare their notes.
I love the PDF summaries from lists. I love the Who shared feature. I LOVE EVERYTHING in MuckRack!
I think PR Newswire's reach is very good. It's a well-known service that's been around a long time and has a solid reputation. You can trust it.
I think PR Newswire helps increase the visibility of news. So although I would also recommend pitching the news, using a wire service, particularly when there's major news to announce, can help in spreading the word.
It's pretty easy to use. You may need someone to walk you through it at first, but you can save distributions and so forth so that it gets easier over time.
When you export a media list, it does not include the email address so you have to search for it offline or on the journalist's profile. It's annoying.
Sometimes when you save a list, not all the contacts you marked are saved and you have to do it over.
There isn't a "click all" button to add all of the contacts to a list. You have to wait until all the people load - which isn't ideal for productivity.
It's the best tool we've found for this type of product. It is not 100% critical to our daily responsibilities, but as a corporate tool made available to us, it is something we leverage on a weekly basis.
Little training was required to leverage the tool. It is a very intuitive platform. The only troublesome aspect of the tool has been the email integration features, but that may be more of a security/IT issue with our corporate requirements than a Much Rack problem. Overall, it is a tool that anyone can leverage without much effort.
PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service
Any time I have had an issue or a question about something on the platform, someone on the chat now function has always answered within 10 mins at most! Everyone I have worked with has been extremely friendly and quick to solve. There is never the inconvenience of having to call, talk to a robot, or deal with an automated email. Customer service is extremely personal and each account also has a designated account manager to oversee the relationship
Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.
I previously used Cision PRWeb. It was a good service, but for what I needed it wasn't as affordable and I also found the backend system difficult to navigate and manage. I loved the ease of use and the ability to find out what I needed almost immediately once I logged into Muck Rack. Because I have to think so much already, having a platform that takes the weight off having to do a lot of extra research and ask questions to just use the system effectively and efficiently is a gift.
PR Newswire is considered one of the two gold standard newswire services because of its wide reach and high quality reporting. Pricing is almost identical to its biggest competitor, Business Wire, so it winds up being a matter of preference and ease more than anything. We actually made the decision to move our business away from PR Newswire due to their growing desire to have editorial oversight over the news we're distributing on behalf of clients.
Muck Rack has paid for itself, as the ability to access its media database is essential to the media relations work I do on behalf of my client. By having access, it helps me make strategic choices of which media to pitch for what and when, which ultimately leads to positive client placements in key articles. This in turn leads to happy clients!
ROI is difficult to calculate in my company's specific industry, but we do know our visibility has increased when we send out a release via PR Newswire.
We send out a relatively small number of press releases a year, so we know when we send out a report if our target audience is receiving it.
With Google and other search engines being the primary way people research information about company's today, we know that when we do a press release via PR Newswire that release will "live" indefinitely on the web, so we know our press release will go much further than the initial distribution.
