Review: What’s the Best News Monitoring Service?
Over the years, we’ve tested virtually all the major media monitoring services, including BurrellesLuce, PR Newswire, Vocus, Meltwater, and Cision. We’ve literally compared their results for individual press outreach campaigns. In our experience, BurrellesLuce is the most effective and comprehensive. Unfortunately, Burrelles is also one of the more expensive services . . . but you get what you pay for.
We routinely conduct large-scale media campaigns — and, quite simply, we’ve found that BurrellesLuce does the best job of finding hits. Unlike most clipping services, BurrellesLuce still uses human beings to capture hard-copy news, and the quality shows. So if you’re searching for that needle-in-a-haystack hit, BurrellesLuce is definitely the way to go.
We also like BurrellesLuce for its iMonitor service, which is an electronic clipping service and competes with free news aggregators like Google News and paid services like PR Newswire and Meltwater. We prefer iMonitor because it has a particularly easy-to-use customer interface and delivers excellent value for the price.
Although iMonitor doesn’t pick up hard-copy news hits, it still catches many clips that, in our experience, the other electronic clipping services miss. iMonitor is the best electronic monitoring service we’ve been able to find. It does return many irrelevant hits, but so does every other electronic news monitoring service.
One of the biggest advantages of BurrellesLuce is that the account representatives are particularly responsive and helpful. When we need to solve a monitoring problem, change a sophisticated search term, or implement a customized-reporting solution, we can often just deputize our account representative to take care of the situation.
Finally, Burrelles has excellent reporting-by-email capabilities. Our clips are auto-delivered by email in a user-friendly format, so we don’t have to log into the system to get our news-hits each day.
