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Muck Rack

Score6.9 out of 10

33 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Muck Rack?

Muck Rack is a public relations offering from Sawhorse Media.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Muck Rack.
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Muck Rack is the team I needed.

Incentivized
Derek D. Ross, MBAView profile
Founder/Director of Marketing & Public Relations in Marketing at The D2 Group (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Muck Rack to support our public relations efforts for our clients. Whether pitching, media list development, or overall research, reporting, and recommendations, Muck Rack is my go-to for all of those strategic public relations decisions. I also use it to build relationships with and stay connected with members of the media. I find it easy to use and reliable.

Pros

  • I love the media tracking and reporting to showcase the ROI for my clients.
  • I like the functionality of the pitching service. It keeps my pitches consistent with formatting and provides great feedback on best practices, etc.
  • I like how easy it is to search and find reports, whether by name or outlet, it has been super helpful for me.

Cons

  • The look and feel of the report would be updated a bit. I like the categories, but visually making it more appealing would be nice.
  • I would say improving tracking coverage. There are times when articles aren't captured based on my keywords, etc. that I have to load manually.
  • The ability to upload media lists to be able to clean, vet, and update. I can do some manually one entry at a time, but not in bulk. At least not from what I've seen

Most Important Features

  • Media List development
  • Pitch/press release distribution
  • Tracking and reporting

Return on Investment

  • Muck Rack has really helped to capture the impact of public relations with clients who don't always understand the impact of media, so I've been able to increase my budgets by 15 - 25% since using Muck Rack accordingly to support those efforts.
  • I've been able to hire more team members as a result of those increased PR budgets Muck Rack helped to drive.
  • I've been able to allocate continued education with access to Muck Rack's academy, insight reports, etc. to stay ahead of the curve with PR best practices and industry evolvement, so that pours back into the ROI because my team and I are able to stay ahead of the latest and greatest skills and thought leadership.

Alternatives Considered

Cision PRWeb

Other Software Used

Adobe Acrobat DC, Hootsuite, Buffer

Muck Rack - basic flaw in their business model. No unsubscribe feature that works.

Gordon DalgleishView profile
President in Corporate at PerryGolf (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently have paused using Muck Rack after less than 90 days due to, in my experience, their inability to unsubscribe recipients from distribution lists. Previously we used it to pitch qualified journalists on our very specific international golf travel programs we operate. We took the view that we wanted the emails to generate under my name & email address as opposed to a generic PR mailbox. This decision allowed us to quickly identify the above issue as recipients would email me repeatedly to unsubscribe, which, in my experience, Muck Rack has acknowledged they cannot do.

Pros

  • After less than 90 days, we are still trying to understand. Thus far, the jury is out on the quality of their lists, as anecdotal evidence suggests it is barely maintained and updated.

Cons

  • Unsubscribe needs to be functional
  • Quality of journalists within a specific subset of interests needs to be verified more accurately & timely than we are currently experiencing

Most Important Features

  • Credibility - which currently they are lacking, in my opinion
  • Responsiveness - which currently they have not shown, in my opinion
  • Accountability & ownership - which is not in their vocabulary, in my opinion

Return on Investment

  • I feel they damaged my credibility by consistently sending emails to persons who have specifically asked to unsubscribe because our business does not match their interests

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, Pardot, Apollo

Driving media impact for comms professionals

Incentivized
Marymar MartinezView profile
Communications Manager, Purpose & Inclusion in Corporate at PwC (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I currently use Muck Rack to:

<ul><li>Identify journalists to pitch on behalf of my company</li><li>Share notes with others in my company on my conversations with journalists</li><li>Set ownership of relationships with journalists to help my colleagues identify who I can pitch on their behalf </li><li>Update contact information based on my relationship with journalists </li><li>Set monitoring alerts on topics I am following</li></ul>

Pros

  • Gather and update journalists' contact information
  • Frequently update and share updates on journalists' job moves
  • Makes it easy to identify journalists by outlet, topic, area

Cons

  • The content in monitoring reports could be vetted more to provide more helpful news stories

Most Important Features

  • Easily identifiable and frequently updated contact information
  • Notes section that is available for all employees of my organization to see
  • Journalist's media coverage section

Return on Investment

  • Muck Rack has helped us increase our response rate.
  • Helped us increase our feature story rate.

Alternatives Considered

Cision PRWeb

Other Software Used

Talkwalker, monday.com

Usability

Don't Sleep on Muck Rack!

Incentivized
Alexis Lipnicki, MBAView profile
Director in Professional Services at Next PR (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Muck Rack for media list building, outlet vetting, pitching, and finding information about journalists and the beats they cover. I also have used their media monitoring services to report on coverage and share of voice to clients. I cannot imagine doing my role without it as it is basically a bible and starting and end point for everything I do in public relations.

Pros

  • Provides journalist contact information
  • Customer service
  • Media monitoring
  • Provides details on media outlets and the audience they reach.

Cons

  • Updates to contact information- but their customer service will fix if you ask.

Most Important Features

  • Journalist contacts
  • Outlet information
  • Media list building
  • Twitter information about contacts

Return on Investment

  • It has a positive ROI on business because we spend less time building media lists than before and are able to build more curated lists.

Alternatives Considered

Cision PRWeb, Cision Communications Cloud and Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

Other Software Used

Signal AI, BuzzSumo, Microsoft Teams

Muck Rack - The Way to Go For Media Database Needs

Incentivized
Scott RosenblumView profile
President/Founder in Professional Services at LEVEL PR (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • always updates media contacts, moves and changes in the media landscape
  • Reporter profiles list contact info, social handles, recent articles and Twitter feed
  • UI makes it easy to build media lists

Cons

  • Main issue is that when you import a media list to Excel, the margins get weird and you have to manually adjust the columns and rows so that the data lines up neatly

Most Important Features

  • ease of use
  • the filter system, which helps to narrow down media lists so that they are not too expansive
  • The database is consistently updated

Return on Investment

  • 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!