Good Value for the Price
October 18, 2021

Good Value for the Price

Jenna Carpentier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform was used by our communications department. If we saw anything (such as certain articles) that would be of particular interest to other folks in the organization, we'd share it with them. Our market development department also received the Daily Digests so they could keep up with what was going on in the industry and be well-versed on hot topics. We used Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform to monitor media mentions for our organization, our competitors, and the industry as a whole. We advocated for the use of structural steel as a building material, so we were interested in tracking new steel buildings/bridges that were being built, advances in steel, the overall sentiment of the steel industry, and any time steel was negatively mentioned (such as a structural problem with a building or bridge, including cracks/failure/collapse). We were also interested in tracking our competitors' materials, like concrete and mass timber, for any advances with those materials or any new/innovative structures being built. We also tracked government affairs and the overall construction industry, with a heavy focus on infrastructure bills and funding. Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform greatly helped us identify the correct articles of interest and filter out any unrelated noise.

Pros

  • Dedicated customer success team
  • Monitoring of online/digital articles
  • Intuitive, user-friendly interface (after the initial set up)

Cons

  • Print publication monitoring
  • Social media monitoring
  • Difficult to set up
  • Saved time and labor by automating the media monitoring process
  • Improved accuracy and frequency of reporting
  • Kept us abreast of industry trends
  • Informed us of competitors' advancements
Our customer success team was fantastic. It consisted of three individuals who worked together on our various needs. They were very responsive and always happy to help. They even came into our physical office once to meet the team and discuss strategy and our needs. I will say we didn't realize at first how much they would do for us. Therefore, we tried setting up our searches and everything on our own. Then we found out they could set up and manage everything for us. In addition, whenever we wanted a change made, we could call or email them, and they'd make the updates (all the searches are based on boolean queries). I feel like they were pretty hands-off in the beginning to let us self-manage our account/search queries/dashboards/etc. However, once we found out that having them manage it was already included in what we were paying for, we let them know that was our preference, and they became much more involved and hands-on. I think they'll adapt to whatever you prefer and what your needs are. I just wish it had been made more abundantly clear from the very beginning that having them set up and manage everything was an option.
Cision and LexisNexis are better for accessing articles behind paywalls. I've found that social-specific tools like Sprout Social or Sprinklr seem to be better for monitoring social media mentions. However, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform may have upped its "social game" since I first tried their social tool capabilities a year ago. I'm not sure how great platforms like Cision and LexisNexis are with tracking print media, but I've had talks with LexisNexis before, and they've said that it is one of their capabilities. On another note, the PR firm FleishmanHillard offers print media tracking and digital media monitoring as a paid service if that's something you're interested in. That's what we ended up doing.

Do you think Meltwater delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Meltwater's feature set?

Yes

Did Meltwater live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Meltwater go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Meltwater again?

Yes

Jira Service Management (Jira Service Desk), Atlassian Confluence, Slack, Trello, Sprout Social, Sprinklr Modern Research, Sprinklr Modern Marketing & Advertising, Khoros CX Insights (formerly Topbox), Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium), Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium), Wrike, Google Analytics, Bitly
Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform is great for monitoring digital publications. My favorite part of Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform was the Daily Digest emails (again, have your customer success team set these up). Twice a day, I'd get an email that had a wrap-up of our media mentions and top stories from the day. This made it extremely easy to keep up to date on the main topics without having to constantly go into the platform. Additionally, you can set up alerts in case there's a sudden influx of articles or mentions of particular keywords. For instance, one thing we wanted to receive instant alerts on was if there was a bridge or building failure/collapse. Once the customer success team got the initial framework built out, it was easy to go in and make minor updates. Of course, they are always happy to help make the changes if you'd prefer. One thing Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform seemed to lack was the ability to monitor for print-based stories. It was able to pull them in if the article also lived online. But if it was only in print, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform wasn't able to report on it. Therefore, we had to do print-based media monitoring manually. There were also quite a few publications pulled in that lived behind paywalls and we weren't able to actually see or read the articles. I know some of Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform's competitors offer better options for accessing articles behind paywalls. They have agreements with the publications that allow you to see the article since you're a paying subscriber to the media monitoring platform. Additionally, I liked how Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform was able to pull in Twitter mentions and comments. However, I'd advise against using it as your social media monitoring platform, as it doesn't do a great job at pulling in posts from the other social channels. They tried to implement a social listening portion of the platform, but we didn't have much luck when we did the trial of it. Instead, we just stuck with Sprout Social for all of our social listening and monitoring needs. Although, occasionally, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform would pull in tweets that Sprout Social seemed to miss, so it was nice to have all of our bases covered from different angles to make sure we weren't missing anything.

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