Meltwater News & Buzz - Authoritative & Timely Media Monitoring
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

Abstract

Meltwater Buzz and Meltwater News provide timely information that is pertinent from a wide range of social media outlets and news sources, respectively. Jan Knight's review finds that the monitoring products allow users to quickly grasp what's happening in the areas being monitored and would provide great value to any professional in a public relations, social media or marketing field.

Item

I’m probably one of the rare individuals who gets her morning tea delivered by her husband! That’s the easy part. Often I wish that, along with that tea, I could receive all the information I need to start my day. My wish would be that it would be authoritative, timely and most importantly, pertinent. To be able to receive that same service throughout the day would be a bonus. Meltwater News and Meltwater Buzz are both impressive products to accompany your morning tea or coffee and help you avoid the unnecessary noise and distractions of the morning information overload.

Meltwater, an international company headquartered in San Francisco, California, produces these two online media monitoring tools. Both allow users to set up alerts on topics, companies and industries of their choice through the use of Agents in News, and Campaigns in Buzz, and thus be presented with timely information that is pertinent.

Meltwater News monitors news worldwide from over 220,000 somewhat traditional news sources, both free and premium, and is continually adding titles from different geographic regions as well as those in different languages. A differentiator, separate from the monitoring aspects of Meltwater News, is that it includes a media contact database of over 350,000 journalists worldwide. Users can search for press contacts in a variety of different ways depending on their need adding to the value that this product can bring to a PR or marketing professional.

Meltwater Buzz monitors news and many additional activities through seven primary social media outlets: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, message boards and comments. In this social media monitoring product users are more concerned about the social media conversations – where they’re happening, who is having them, how many of them there are the robustness (the volume) of those conversations. In the Buzz product, social conversations are the primary tools for insight.

Both monitoring products include intuitive search and filtering interfaces with clean, easy-to-read displays. The Dashboards and displays in Meltwater News, and the visually pleasing and effective graphical charts and displays in Meltwater Buzz allow users to grasp quickly what’s happening in the areas being monitored.

Cut Through Noise and Distractions

The products allow customers to not only view and analyse press stories or social media conversations as they happen, but they provide a variety of very efficient ways in which the information can be shared within the customer’s company or with other stakeholders. Multiple exporting options and newsletter creation tools are available in both products.

Both products, used either together or separately can provide great value to any professional in a public relations, social media or marketing field. Meltwater is happy to demo their products and they also provide a 14-day free trial for interested companies during which full support for those product modules is available.

Sign up for a demo and make your mornings calmer. I promise you your tea or coffee will taste even better - delivered or not!

Full Review

The full FreePint Report: Product Review of Meltwater News and Meltwater Buzz is now available to those with a FreePint Subscription.

Chapters in the full review:

• Meltwater: Introduction, Value and FreePint's View
• Meltwater News: Sources, Search & Outputs
• Meltwater Buzz: Sources, Search & Outputs
• Meltwater: User Interface, Customer Support, Pricing & Contact Details
• Meltwater: Executive Summary

Editor's Note: Beyond Aggregation  

This article is part of the FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation, which runs from October to November 2013. Register your interest, and you'll get pre-notification of when registration opens for any webinars in this series, as well as a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on News Content when we publish in November.

Platinum Sponsors:

« Blog