PR Services Vendors Dissected in LinkedIn Bull Session

Cision, Vocus, Gorkana, Meltwater, BurrellesLuce, PR Newswire, Media Miser and TV Eyes get puffs and pans in a 3,671-word confab on LinkedIn. PR people struggling to find the right media distribution and measurement service can find answers here.

Basile

Jon-Michael Basile, communications staffer at Data Quality Campaign, Washington, D.C., has touched off an unprecedented, no-holds-barred analysis of eight firms that provide access to hundreds of thousands of editors and social media points.

The discussion by 41 participants will be useful to PR practitioners who are more likely to use such services because one-on-one relationships with editors, including face-to-face meetings and phone conversations, are becoming a rarity.

GTCR, which has invested nearly $900 million in acquiring Cision, Vocus and Gorkana, sees growth for these services. Several participants wondered how the acquisition by GTCR will affect the services.

One straw in this wind is Cola-Cola this month urging PR staffers to use e-mail and texting in dealing with reporters. Coke says this will "increase productivity." It also allows the company to monitor staff interactions with the press.

Data Quality Campaign, Washington, D.C., founded in 2005, is a national effort to "improve the collection, availability and use of high-quality education data…to improve student achievement." Nearly 100 organizations are participating.

Users of the services are advised to do "real time" tests of the databases which may be out-of-date for desired editors.

"Ugly," "Aggressive," Sales Staff Hit

Although there were many comments in praise of Meltwater's services, four of the comments slammed the firm's sales staff, one saying it was "off-putting to start with," another that it is "extremely aggressive," and another saying it is "the most aggressively ugly sales staff on earth and will not take a polite no for an answer." A fourth posting said "Meltwater salespeople are a problem."

Two postings criticized the databank of Meltwater. One said, "A lot of the information is years out of date." Another said, "Meltwater's media contact database is the biggest turnoff. My emails get an absurd amount of bounces...Vocus and Cision have better CRM [customer relationship management] capabilities with better customization."

"Meltwater does everything we need but we combine it with Press Association Wire Service," said another entry. "The only thing I think that Gorkana has on Meltwater at the moment is the frequent events they run with senior journos, which are genuinely useful."

Vocus also took some hits. "I've never worked with a worse vendor than Vocus," said one posting, which cited "aggressive sales, inflexible contract terms and by far the worse, terrible user experience." Another participant said Vocus should offer a trial.

Meltwater, which has 50 offices in 27 countries, is based in San Francisco.

One comment by a user of Vocus for many years was: "I had almost one year of free news and blog searches from Meltwater about two years ago…Vocus will give you much more value overall at half the price that Meltwater is now trying to charge. However, Meltwater's news and blog search/discovery yields 75% more results than Vocus. If placements on small blogs are important to you, and you have huge budgets, Meltwater's discovery and reporting features are far superior. At current pricing, Meltwater will be too much for all but the largest brands."

The writer wondered if "the days of great value at the best price are over for Vocus customers now that they have been acquired by Cision." He feels Cision has "the best contact database in the market" although he had not yet made a comparison with Meltwater's.

One of Eight Services Responds

Although the pluses and minuses of the services are discussed in detail, and many statements made that could be challenged, there was only one posting from one of the services mentioned—PR Newswire.

Salesperson Michael McNamara said PRN customers should at least be trying out its "Agility" platform which has been improved over the past four years with new features and functions including feedback.

The seven other services should examine what is being said about them in LinkedIn including complaints of aggressive sales pitches, whether contracts are too rigid, and whether the software is user-friendly.

McNamara

One PR person said he uses BurrellesLuce for monitoring, Cision for the media database and SalesForce for e-mail pitching and tracking, steering away from "all-in-one" solutions.

MediaMiser Is Sold, Re-Opens Bulldog

MediaMiser, which provides media monitoring and analysis and which was mentioned twice in the discussion of media data services, was sold to Innodata, New York, according to an announcement Dec. 24. MM will revive Bulldog Reporter, which had gone into bankruptcy in October, listing nearly $900K in debts.

Innodata, with sales of $64.5 million and 5,000 employees in eight countries, provides information products and online retail destinations worldwide, serving publishers, media and information companies, digital retailers, banks and government agencies,

Innodata said its MM subsidiary purchased in a bankruptcy sale Bulldog's intellectual property and assets including Daily Dog, Bulldog Awards, Inside Health Media, Media Pro and certain books and publications. Some staff have been rehired including editor Richard Carufel.

Customers of Bulldog will receive enhanced monitoring and analysis solutions from MM that will complement their existing media relations subscriptions, said MM president Chris Morrison.