Marg Meltwater

Decent media database of reporter information.

Meltwater as a service platform isn't bad. I subscribed to Meltwater News for a full year at about $3,000. This gave me access to their media database which was relatively accurate. Some records were either out of date or not listed at all. But that wasn't my main complaint. No database can be 100% current or accurate.

My main complaint is with the fact that your annual account is renewed automatically for $3,000 unless you give official notification 60 days before your current agreement is up.

Yes, they include this language in the small print of the agreement, and bad on me for not carefully reading every line.

But in this day and age to force clients to stay for another year at such a high rate is unthinkable.

Stay far, far FAR away from Meltwater.

Note the 60 day cancellation notice requirement or you will be auto-renewed for a full year with no way out.

Find media reporter and editor contact information.

Didn't find the solution particularly easy to use

Meltwater has a 60 day auto-renewal that they do not include in your order confirmation but bury in online terms of service (which are normally reserved for things like don't post hate content or abuse user accounts, not the business/financial terms of your contract. Their sales reps do not notify you of this, and in fact send you emails about whether you're planning to renew that imply otherwise. Once you are one day past the 60 days, they hold on like grim death and force you into an auto-renewal regardless of whether you want to continue the service or not. Companies with good products don't have to rely on fine print to force people to do business with them; the Meltwater products are not good enough to justify the hassle of their business practices. If you do decide to buy from them, pay by check so they don't have access to your credit card information in case they decide you owe them money whether you agree or not.

None

I would guess that Meltwater is a pretty robust media monitoring tool for the right company.

We could never get the news filtering into our searches to be clean and usable. We could never get to a point where we could send out an alert to members of the management team because there was always an extraneous article (or 10 being pulled into any feed we made. I get that "Belden" is a last name and the name of a town, but we could just never get the news we needed no matter how many filters we put in place.

If you have a common company name, be prepared to spend a lot of time developing filters and keywords to get at the news you want to see.

It actually caused more problems than it solved, unfortunately. I spent many hours trying to get it up and running only to have our marketing teams reject it.

The social media monitoring and online news monitoring work well.

The broadcast monitoring does not pick up the majority of alerts even when they include the keywords. In addition, when alerts are picked up, the interviews are 99% of the time incomplete and it could take days for the account rep to find the rest of the clip, which when working in a time sensitive industry is completely unacceptable. I require timely transcripts and clips, and I do not receive that from Meltwater.

I was advertised a product that could replace my current media monitoring, yet Meltwater is so incredibly unreliable that I have not been able to cancel my other service. I am therefore paying for two services due to false advertising from Meltwater. Once they have your money, they do not care about providing good customer service. I have been trying to find a solution with the company for over a month before writing this review.

Do not use this service if you require timely and reliable broadcast media monitoring.

The social media monitoring and online news monitoring are helpful, but not worth anywhere close the amount I paid for full service media monitoring.

Nothing comes to mind. We signed a one year contract, were unhappy, and were forced into a second year.

Their estimations/calculations for ad value and circulation were so overblown and unrealistic that they were unusable. We also fell prey to their auto-renewal policy, which was of course buried in the fine print and not discussed until it was too late.

It has been a while since we used them, but we do not have happy memories. Although we still get calls every year that they have made modifications, I will never use them again, for this or any other company.

We discontinued our relationship with Meltwater years ago, after using them for media monitoring. I did not realize any benefits that I remember.