Cision Reviews

Cision does the work for you

Comments: We did a lot of manual grind searching in Google and Bing for opportunities, Cision has helped us quicken that process without worrying if we had a good resource to reach out to or not.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Cision Platform Review

Comments: The benefits I received are the open & click rates of my new releases. So if I notice that one of my important editors didn't open it it allows me to resend to that editor.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

I want to like it

Comments: I was actually the person who convinced my boss to purchase Cision for a start-up I was at in 2018. It was helpful, but I'm not sure if it was entirely worth the expense. In part, it was because I didn't have buy-in from necessary stakeholders and there was a significant time investment to sifting through to find contacts. In my current position, I inherited Cision from a predecessor. Again, I feel the money could be better spent elsewhere. Again, it's probably because less the platforms fault and more because we don't have the internal resources to fully dedicate to PR. I've always found the customer service there to be incredibly friendly and helpful.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

The search felt a little cumbersome at times, and I've come across some outdated data.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.

The Only Press Release Tool Worth The Time & Money

Comments: Cision is an excellent partner for releasing, disributing and getting visibility for press releases. Our news feels seen - in the best way possible - and feels like we have a very effective partner in Cision.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Great tool for PR

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Ok media database, good monitoring, and everything else is disappointing.

Comments: Ok media database, good monitoring, and everything else is disappointing.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Used it during Vocus/Cision transition

Pros:

Access to tens of thousands of journalists is useful as a PR practitioner. It also does a great job of tracking insights like tone and monitoring where your organization appears in the news.

Cons:

We constantly found journalists who hadn't been at their newspaper for over two years. Contact information is frequently outdated. The cost is practically that of a full-time employee. The PRWeb newswire they advertise frequently sends releases to websites with zero traffic, but counts it as a hit. And while their analytics are useful, I'd often go back to a prior month and run the same search string as before and be returned different numbers than the first time. It's hard to trust data that doesn't remain constant.

Clunky Compared to Competitors

Comments: Overall I would not recommend Cision because of the issues we experienced, but some of their tools are strong and it could be worthwhile depending on what you need. Our predecessors had chosen Cision, and while we did renew a couple of times due to the poor timing of making a transition, we eventually switched to Meltwater to consolidate our vendors and have a more user-friendly tool.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Can't live with it, Can't live without it

Comments: When it comes to media databases, none are really amazing. Cision is one of the top contenders and a necessary evil for PR.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Cision

Comments: While its a business necessity for my line of work, Cision could be a smoother experience overall and could be more user friendly.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Good tool for media contacts.

Comments: You need the contacts, Vocus has them.

Pros:

Lots of great media contacts for all categories from technology to finance, consumer products to juvenile goods and everything in between.

Cons:

It's expensive. I get that it is hard to keep these lists current with all the movement and magazine closings...

Cision Sucks in Every Possible Way! DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT.

Comments: Virtually none.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Cision Review

Comments: I often use Cision to find out the readership of different media outlets, or to find emails of media contacts.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Media Friendly Platform

Comments: Very pleasant experience and found a lot of useful tools, such as list building and more

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Necessary evil of the PR industry

Pros:

Once you have figured out how to navigate Cision to get the information you need, it is relatively straightforward to use. Can be a good starting point when building lists, etc.

Cons:

Missing critical reporter contact information across all types of publications, not very "smart" in terms of search and pulling only the truly relevant results from keywords.

Powerful but less relevant

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Really excellent communications software

Comments: Definitely the best tool I have used for comms and PR. Really happy.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

While cision is a very large database, it doesn't provide the best insight into the journalist.

Pros:

It's pretty easy to use. There are TONS of results and it's a very large database. There are a lot of ways in which you can break down your search (locations, topics, keywords, names, etc.)

Cons:

The topics are pretty broad and it often leads to pitching the wrong journalist. There's no way to truly see what the person writes about.

Great

Comments: If we ever needed help understanding how to do something we got it right away.

Pros:

This is an easy to use multi use platform that my company and myself utilizes regularly with great success.

Cision

Comments: It was never the only thing that we were using, but could occasionally be helpful if we couldn't find the information we needed anywhere else.

Pros:

Cision can be really great when it comes to finding contact information for various writers, editors, and media people. Sometimes, there's information that is hard to come by elsewhere.

Cons:

Sometimes, the information provided on Cision is outdated or accessible for free via the internet as opposed to using a paid service.

Only Game in Town

Comments: think they probably corner the market on PR software.. but that doesn't mean improvements can't be made.

Pros:

Cision offers an extremely wide span of media outlets... from large to the insanely minute publication.. it defintiely provides a good scope of everything in between! I

Cons:

I think this software is somewhat "clunky" ... think there is definitely room from improvement with the user interface. Moving between listings is a little complex.

great for us, not so great for latin america

Comments: save you a lot of time to do media lists, but definitely need to improve.

Pros:

this is my go-to software when having a pitch in the us market. have a lot of journalists and media for your pitch.

Cons:

i wish the journalists for latin america were more complete. A lot of media ins't even in the database and when there is, is never updated. Other think i don't like is that this include name as directors of media or companies and/or s-suite contacts. If you send a pitch to this people you are bothering them. editors should be more clearly marked.

Loved the Social Media Monitoring component

Comments: The ability to track, manage, and report on how users are engaging with your brand / company. A 1 stop shop to manage all PR functions.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Another Great Option for Marketing on Social Media

Comments: This is for marketing professionals who need a boost on social media. So may deem it unnecessary--especially the millennials

Pros:

As someone who is in the younger crowd, this is useful to me because when I started, I was unsure about how to reach who I needed to. Helped me immensely!

Great PR distribution system

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.