Cision

Vorteile

Cision allows us to know every time we are mentioned in the media, which gives us the opportunity to not only track where we are and what is said about us, but also share that media with our followers on social platforms. Cision is also crucial in our media outreach, especially when contacting local media where we may not have regular contacts.

Nachteile

A lot of the searches, you need help with their client relations folks, who are amazing, but it's an extra step we don't always have time for.

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Vorteile

The customizable dashboards are easy to use, and I love the visualizations.

Nachteile

We had a lot of issues setting up our dashboards and our Google Analytics kept getting disconnected (over 5 times).

Vorteile

During my time working for another company, I utilized this particular product for publishing Press Releases as it was their preferred method. The outcome of my published Press Releases was satisfactory, with seamless image integration. The publishing process itself was also hassle-free, and I appreciated the ability to preview my content before it went public. Additionally, the feature of scheduling releases ahead of time proved to be a helpful time management tool.

Nachteile

In all honesty, I found the published content to have a great appearance. However, given the price, I was disappointed with the limited reach. The publishing packages came with a "use it or lose it" time constraint for credits purchased. Additionally, contacting customer support proved to be a challenging experience. Despite having a direct contact number for my sales representative, I had to leave multiple messages and emails before receiving a response.

Vorteile

Cision has always been the gold standard for media research. The robust platform boasted hundreds of updates daily, and the media list output has been largely reliable.

Nachteile

Unfortunately, Cision either suffers from poor leadership, poor vision, a lack of care for its customers, or some combination of all the above. Aside from the fact that the results are no longer as reliable as they used to be, each and every update to the user interface has made the platform worse. The UX is not intuitive or easy to use. The customer service is not remarkable in any way. The technical support is a bit of a disaster.

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Gründe für den Wechsel zu Cision

Vorteile

There is no doubt that Cision is a perfect tool for marketing. This service offers the easiest way to find a particular influencer. With a help of a special menu, you can choose a precise category and choose a proper category in order to get an exact outcome. Moreover, it offers to pick up a theme or a location in order to find a person that is connected with the same informational field as you do. Cision is a great service for social media marketing. It has a solid database, flexible and user-friendly interface and many useful tools for marketing. With its assistance, you can turn into reality different marketing strategies within a second.

Nachteile

Unfortunately, Cision isn’t perfect. An automated search doesn’t work properly, so you to rely only on your personal research. Despite the fact that Cision has a profound database, it still lacks the data itself. Sometimes, their researches can be a little bit slow and there is no chance to find a particular person that you really want to find. Moreover, if you don’t know the right name of the influencer, you won’t find him or her at all.

Vorteile

I love how easy it is to look up an outlet and find the correct contact to reach out to with a particular pitch. It's also extremely easy to look up outlet circulations, which we research all of the time in order to maximize visibility. Cision is normally pretty up-to-date with different outlets, which is impressive in a constantly shifting media landscape.

Nachteile

Sometimes the search requirements can be a little too specific, and an outlet has to be typed in a very specific way to appear (i.e. with or without "the" in front, etc.) It'd be great if there were suggested terms, similar to Google, so that if you don't know the exact spelling of a last name you could still track down the contact.

Vorteile

I've used Cision on and off throughout my (long) career. It has always been 'on top of things'. I always felt it was innovative and did a good job of gathering media data.

Nachteile

I've found that the database isn't as user friendly as some of the other databases that are out there. I also have a subscription to a competitor and have found that Cision does not pull in the same articles as this competitor.

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Vorteile

You get contact info from journalist that you wouldn't be able to find online. And they all have opted in. Great search tool to find new outlets and great monitoring service.

Nachteile

Expensive software but you are purchasing a lot of contact information. Great if you have a big PR initiative, otherwise it's hard to validate the expense

Vorteile

Cision put monitoring, and outreach together in one platform and made it easy to build media lists of relevant contacts

Nachteile

I was using an older version of Cision (CisionPoint) which was very slow, but this appears to have been fixed in the new cloud platform. Not intuitive or easy to fix search terms (again I think this has been updated)

Vorteile

The ability to reach out and find people for link ops or for content ops is amazing. The reach and database they have built for this is impressive. We've done several "expert pieces" for clients and the fact we can use this to curate the content we have has sped up our process. Cision's quality of reporters is also nice to trust. We know they don't let just anyone in their database and it allows us to pick and chose who we want to work with.

Nachteile

It's pricey, but you pay for the high quality of resources which benefits you and your clients in the long run.

Vorteile

Reputable and relatively easy to use. I use for finding press releases, breaking news and emails for relevant contacts.

Nachteile

A little bit of an eyesore to look at when others are building more navigable news and press aggregators

Vorteile

The HARO subscription that comes with this product is incredibly handy. The contact database is useful, especially when I was trying to find blogs willing to review a new product.

Nachteile

The search felt a little cumbersome at times, and I've come across some outdated data. It's very labor intensive to sift through to find valuable contacts and establish a rapport with them. The software doesn't replace a PR professional with solid industry contacts. It bothers me that I can't set up my own listening devices and had to reach out to our rep any time I wanted to make a change. I've yet to come across anything in their that didn't pop up on other alerts I have set up in other platforms, so that piece of the software felt redundant for me.

Vorteile

This software has everything you need for PR management I one spot: press releases, contact lookups, media monitoring. This is the premium system to use.

Nachteile

The media monitoring alerts can be a little tricky to setup and remove.

Vorteile

Cision is the most popular media database out there. It has the ability to do a lot of things. You can search for all types of media contacts, build lists, etc.

Nachteile

My experience is mixed, however, as I find it a bit hard to use for basics like searching or building a list. It's also expensive. I'd consider alternatives before purchasing.

Vorteile

I love how it can easily create media lists, with very little time. It is great to use in a pinch to find media target contact information

Nachteile

The user experience seems to be a little outdated. The look and feel of the software could definitely use a more modern update

Vorteile

Reporter database constantly updated, new features including social accounts and connections to other reporters covering similar topics are great

Nachteile

Sometimes can be hard to find niche outlets or outlets without clearly defined roles for staff to pitch

Vorteile

So easy to search for the right people. Wouldn't be able to find these journalists and PR people by using a simple web search. So it's really great for PR activity. Great for getting content out there.

Nachteile

I wouldn't exactly call this software cheap. Although excellence should come at a price! Initial training was also a bit confusing.

Vorteile

PRWeb and PRNewswire market share drove our usage (we got upsold into trying Cision Cloud).

There is some value in having filterable media contact lists....but not at their price points.

Nachteile

Horrifically bad value for money - our worst software purchase of 2017. We left.

"Unified cloud" was 100% overhyped. Rolled out with unclear UX, broken features

Too many of the media contacts emails bounce.

Many of lists are poorly scrubbed - you end up with random contacts that don't fit the segment you are targetting.

"Account managers" are useless at solving issues - lots of back and forth by email with no resolution.

Vorteile

Great for doing research on publications, writers, etc., and superb tool for media release distribution.

Nachteile

Cost. It's a great tool, but not inexpensive.

Vorteile

I liked that it had a huge directory of contacts to look up and is very easy to use. I looked up specific contacts and the program had it.

Nachteile

It's a bit old school in it's design. It definitely could use a refresh. Also, contacts should be updated frequently.

Vorteile

Cision is an invaluable asset when it comes to building media databases quickly and effectively. I manage public relations across different countries, and this tool helps me save a considerable amount of time and resources. Not only it provides journalists' names, contact details, interests and social media accounts: Cision also offers outlet stats, including readership and ad rates, as well as editorial opportunities. A great aid when it comes to pitching the right story to the right journalist.

Nachteile

Cision's database is vast but it's not complete. Not all media contacts are actually working and updated, so there's a certain probability to get few bounce emails. Another minus is that it does not provide a list of the journalists' latest published articles - a functionality offered by Cision's competitors, which is extremely helpful when pitching to the media -.

Vorteile

It's very comprehensive and has great customer support. You actually get an account manager which is helpful when you are first setting yourself up on the platform.

Nachteile

The cost is obviously a bit prohibitive but they have volume discounts. The process of uploading a release can also be a bit daunting with so many things and add-ons that you can use.

Vorteile

The product is a publicists' dream, making it easier than ever to find media contacts and new outlets

Nachteile

The platform can be slow, there isn't much mobile presence and sometimes the contacts and insights are outdated

Vorteile

It is an incredibly exhaustive list of media contacts with hard-to-find contact info

Nachteile

Sometimes you get oddball search results and the smaller regional media outlets are represented only very lightly in some cases.

Vorteile

What I liked most was the ability to track, manage, and monitor all your social media activity and track how users are engaging with your company / brand. The analytics and insights you gain from this can be invaluable to the success of a company.

Nachteile

You need to have a fairly significant PR budget to order and use Cision, not necessarily doable for a smaller company.

Vorteile

Cision est un logiciel simple d'utilisations, qui permet de switcher d'un client à un autre rapidement et facilement. La veille média est concluante et rapide : les parutions tombent toute la journée. Selon moi, c'est le meilleur logiciel de veille pour la presse print.

Nachteile

Cependant, quelques parutions peuvent échapper des radars Cision. Il est donc primordial de faire sa veille personnelle à côté.

Vorteile

Pige les articles automatiquement donc pas de recherche manuellement à faire ! C'est donc in gain de temps inconsidérable !

Nachteile

Quelques articles passent à la trape et le temps de récupération des articles et parfois long

Vorteile

L'outil est simple d'utilisation, tous les facteurs peuvent être affinés afin de trouver les informations utiles et pertinentes.

Nachteile

L'outil ne reconnaît pas toujours les bons articles, toutefois ce défaut n'est que ponctuel.

Vorteile

La pige quotidienne est à jour, en revanche, une deuxième vérification est toujours nécessaire pour ne rien louper.

Nachteile

La communication des nouvelles parutions,

Vorteile

My company used Cision for PR management. We did not receive any value.

Nachteile

Cision will not stop billing my company. Within 24 hours of receiving a contract renewal we sent an email cancelling the contract. Cision did not reply and processed payment anyway. We contacted Cision to end the contract and they responded that we must notify them 5 months in advance to cancel a contract. How would we even know if we wanted to cancel at that time?

Vorteile

The Native Articles that accompany a press release

Nachteile

The cost and the difficulty creating client reports to demonstrate success

Vorteile

I worked with Vocus for years and loved it. They had a massive, easy-to-search database, great integration and awesome customer service. But Cision is a sham. Their database is a joke. I usually have to manually add the outlets I want to reach. Their customer service reps are very poorly trained and can't answer simple questions, and parts of their site are often down. The company seems to have been broken into small parts that are not integrated. It's clunky, ineffective and a waste of money.

Nachteile

Yes. The search function is needlessly complicated. The database is very shallow. Cision and PRweb are not really integrated. And customer service is virtually nonexistent.

Vorteile

While many will say that the platform is a bit dated, Cision remains the gold standard in its field. The reliability, usability, and overall data quality makes me an extremely satisfied customer. Cision certainly excels at obtaining contact information and list building.

Nachteile

Cision's data analysis could be better. I often find myself using a service like Netbase to get deeper data concerning "what" people are saying exactly.

Vorteile

This is a great affordable solution for those monitoring their media (and social media) mentions and you're on a budget.

Nachteile

1. The interface is clunky
2. Sometimes they miss monitoring sites that may be firewall/subscription protected
3. Customer services isn't the best - you are dependent on Cision to change the keywords you're monitoring for vs having the freedom to do it yourself.
4. Training was not clear. We went through it several times, and never received the same guidance. Very confusing. And when there were changes mid-subscription, it took a week to get our new updates implemented and support to use the newer interact.
5. When renewing our service, our sales rep made promises on the phone and discussed price with us. We received a contract a week later with 5 days to sign and return it OR they threatened to increase our price by 5-7%! Completely unacceptable, as we have had a relationship with Cision for years! Our company has a process to sign a contract, and it's definitely longer than 5 days!

Vorteile

As a PR professional, Cision is vital to me. I use it everyday and it can be a huge help in identifying targets across the globe. They are always updating the platform and making it easy to save and search lists.

Nachteile

I don't like how when you use the quick search, having the right spacing of the publication name is important to finding the publication. Additionally, cision will sometimes kick you out of the platform while you are working on lists and those lists wont get saved and you have to start all over. The look and feel of the platform is a little outdated and could use a refresh.

Vorteile

I use Cision at least on a weekly basis to search for media coverage for a multitude of clients. What a lifesaver. It does an amazing job to find media coverage worldwide and some stuff on social media.

Nachteile

It takes a while to set up for each client. Thank god that Cision support helps with this. Sometimes connecting with your Cision rep is difficult and takes time. Their social media coverage needs some work but they have made strides.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Vorteile

The only pro that we can think of is the simplicity of submitting your release online. It seemed simple enough. Also their 1800 customer service was helpful with technical questions.

Nachteile

We started with PR Web and they wanted to sell us the services from PR Newswire, their promise was that they will have a better reporting, better chance to have press releases picked up by media, etc. -- We sent out a first press release and the results were terrible. The report was pretty much the same as PR Web, which is an automatic publication from their partners on sites that are really not reputable at all. They even have personal blogs listed. -- When we contacted the representative in charge of our account he said "Your press release had great results" and then he suggested we create a google alert to see where our press release was published.
We tried this service with the idea that it would be better than paying a free lance PR agent in México. We paid for 1 release double of what we paid the agent in a whole month and we absolutely regret joining this service. -- It might work for other areas but for Mexico it absolutely does not work. The WORST part is the lack of willingness to help the client resolve the problem. They offered no solutions or help.

Vorteile

The Cision database is fairly complete. If you know who you are looking for, you can usually find their name and contact information there. The news monitoring function — alerts which track news published online — does a fairly good job of giving me a heads-up about coverage. If you want to track coverage by source type against particular names or keywords, Cision monitoring will sometimes produce sources that Google alerts will not, and it will usually beat the alerts by a day or so.

Nachteile

Reporter discovery is hard. Beat designations within Cision seem very rudimentary and “thick”— reporters listed as “Technology,” for instance, might cover “artificial intelligence” or “embedded analytics” or “machine learning” or some combination of the three. Given the fact that an off-beat pitch can easily result in a communications representative being added to a reporter’s spam list, it’s critical that you know exactly what a reporter is writing about, or risk having no way to contact a reporter ever again.

For media search, I needed Boolean search. Cision promised that functionality but, without getting too far into the limitations of their archiving, their provider agreements, and their search functionality, I found it a very clunky and inefficient way to search coverage on the fly. It's also super frustrating to be told that a publication is "in the database" but isn't searchable, because of licensing covenants.

Vorteile

Base de données pas toujours mise à jour. Infos parfois erronées

Nachteile

Le gros problème est l'organisation del'entreprise. Ils facturent à tord et à travers, de façon opaque. On se retrouve avec plusieurs factures impossible à vérifier car lié à des consommation de points (lis aux parutions obtenus). La résiliation ne se fait que par lettre AR. Il vous menace si ce n'est pas fait un mois avant la date d'échéance et il n vous la rappelle pas , bien sûr.
Et il y a de grosses procédures de relances avant même la date d'échéance des factures.

Vorteile

Cision's reporter database is much more robust than Meltwater's, as they have trade/niche publications and more complete staff listings. You could also do more customization with the e-blasts.

Nachteile

We had a terrible experience with the constant switching of reps, but even worse was that it took literal hours to pull metrics for our Board of Directors. I

Vorteile

Cision allows us to track the online conversation surrounding a certain topic, and allows us to keep a pulse on how our company and products are being discussed.

Nachteile

Sentiment is an issue. Cision automatically grades content as positive, negative, or neutral, but it is FAR from a perfect process. Often times, certain trigger words result in something being graded a certain way, but the context is not interpreted. For instance, a headline may read "XYZ platform prevents bad customer experiences" but because the Cision software sees "bad customer experiences" it is automatically graded as a negative sentiment, despite being positive. This creates a decent amount of manual effort to sort through all content.

Vorteile

The ease of the platform is extremely good! The on-board training I received from account manager was extremely through. Also, sending out emails are very easy.

Nachteile

I don't really have any cons about the platform.

Vorteile

Cision works when you want to find a specific reporter's email; i.e. you know their name and publication. It's also helpful in figuring out the email formats of different publications.

Nachteile

It's not very intuitive. If you type in the name of an outlet, for example, all outlets that have any part of the words used in the query will appear. Results require a lot of manual sorting to figure out what is relevant to your search and what isn't.

Vorteile

Cision makes users feel like their press releases and news are being seen and heard by the correct audiences and that such press releases actually make some waves - we have consistenly seen feeback, outreach and other traffic when posting to and using Cision.

Nachteile

My only complaint with Cision is that their internal search can sometimes qualify or disqualify press releases for certain topics/categories/indsutries into diferent baskets and categories than they ought to belong to, but this has a seemingly minimal impact on a campaign's overall performance.

Vorteile

Cision is a great resource to have when evaluating media outlets and using it as a database to access contacts of these media outlets

Nachteile

Hard to navigate, UVM seems overly inflated, and not all the outlets are accessible online. Also, when searching for outlets its hard to navigate because the online version of news is considered a separate outlet from the paper or magazine version, when they're owned by the same entity.

Vorteile

I use this software in my work in PR, and find it useful for finding information needed regarding media outlets and media contacts.

Nachteile

I find that often the information is out dated when it comes to numbers, emails, etc.

Vorteile

We use this to help build our media lists to reach out to media with

Nachteile

I feel like the breadth of reporters on this database is not good as some other reporter databases.

Vorteile

Useful database of media contacts, very helpful in identifying key contacts as we moved into new markets.

Nachteile

Unfortunately, with the changing landscape of journalism and the disappearance of "beat" reporters, the usefulness of the product decreased for us.

Vorteile

The ability to live track press releases is a huge deal and presented in a clean easy to use dashboard. During setup, it's extremely easy to set up exactly what you want. A member of the team will call you to confirm that everything is exactly what you want before going live. The direct connection they have to massive news outlets makes this a crucial tool for press releases.

Nachteile

If you need a more defined and niche audience to be reached, the price could almost triple in some points. Which makes it unrealistic in most cases.

Vorteile

If you need a press release "published" (even if just to Cision) this is a good option. I've used the lowest level a few times for this reason. It can create a professional page to share but don't expect any real pick up from putting out on Cision (at least on the least expensive level).

Nachteile

We didn't get any pickup. (to be fair, I didn't expect much as I used the lowest level they offer)
Also, the interface is pretty dated.