Link
www.customscoop.com
Specifications
CustomScoop provides online news, social media monitoring and custom news briefing reports.
Cost
Monthly plans range from $299 (three users, 25 keyword search agents, and a 30-day archive) to $1,499 (25 users, 2,500 keyword search agents, and unlimited archiving). Custom plans for enterprise clients are also available
User
Jennifer Conway, account supervisor at Dotted Line Communications, has been using CustomScoop since 2012.
How do you use it?
We set up our account to search for keywords pertinent to our clients and their competitors. When you log on to your account, you land on a homepage that has all of the results driven from the keywords you set up.
There are multiple tabs on the homepage dashboard. You can use a keyword tab to select or enter any keyword you want. Then CustomScoop serves up all of the coverage for that keyword within a given time period, which you can set.
There’s also a tab for custom reports and alerts. I automatically get an email alert at about 10am every morning with all of the coverage in the past 24 for all of my clients. I have coverage alerts automatically sent to some of my colleagues as well.
Inside the reporting tab it just takes a couple of clicks to generate either a spreadsheet or a graph report categorized by type of coverage, social media mentions, or Facebook mentions only, and more. You can define the perimeters for any report.
CustomScoop’s customer service is fantastic. If we have a problem, we email the team and they respond either by email or phone, usually within a couple of hours.
When we first started using the platform, CustomScoop’s team helped walk us through how to use the platform and set up keywords. For the first few months, I would often get calls or emails from them just checking in to make sure the keywords I was adding were going to yield optimal results.
How does it serve your business needs?
Measurement is a huge aspect of agency life – you have to show results to clients on ongoing basis.
We mainly report on a monthly or a quarterly basis for most of our clients. CustomScoop lets us pull in all of their coverage and some of the impressions and quickly create reports that showcase the work we’ve done for them.
Our clients also need to show the value of their PR budget to their internal colleagues, and CustomScoop makes it easy for us to help them do that.
We recently put out a press release for our client Whitepages around names of Halloween movie characters and their popularity across the US. CustomScoop surfaced 10 to 15 stories – including an ABC broadcast story – that Google News Alerts did not find. Without CustomScoop we probably would not have gotten credit for those stories.
We also use the platform to watch coverage of our clients’ competitors. Recently there was as story about a Whitepages competitor that looked bigger on social than it actually was. CustomScoop allowed us to see that it was really only one significant story and a couple of smaller ones. Then we were able to debunk the notion that it was such a big story.
What are the main benefits?
Ease of use and it’s fast. We can go into our dashboard at any time and create a report within a couple of clicks.
It’s easy to sort data and pull exactly what we need – whether it’s just social coverage, blog posts, or coverage in Texas.
What are the main drawbacks?
Like any monitoring tool, it doesn’t pick up every single piece of coverage. It does pick up much more than other tools we’ve used, and we’ve used a lot.
We like to customize reports in different ways for clients, and that requires a little manual work. This isn’t a drawback to CustomScoop per se – it’s just the nature of client service.
What would you like to see improved/added?
Additional report formats would be nice.
Competitors
Meltwater: Provides a social media marketing suite (Meltwater Buzz) as well as global media monitoring and analytics, a media contact database, and news distribution services (Meltwater News).
Cision: Provides a media database, press release distribution, media monitoring, media analysis, and more.
