Meltwater vs Hookle: Which is a better fit?

Linda R.: My name is Linda. I'm a director of digital communications in the higher education industry, and I give Meltwater three out of five stars. Before we onboarded Meltwater, we were doing a lot of manual compilation and manual monitoring. We have looked at setting up Google Alerts, but we didn't find that they were robust enough to do what we wanted. That's why we settled on Meltwater. The main reason that we chose Meltwater was because we had had a series of communications crises, specifically in the social media realm in prior years. We found that our manual monitoring was unsustainable and didn't give our stakeholders the benchmarks and information that they needed quickly enough. We really needed a new solution, and Meltwater was able to provide that for us. Meltwater wasn't overly complex to onboard, but it also wasn't one of those things where you can get started right out of the box. It required a few calls with our team. It required some coordination. Some of the coordination was on our own side, really figuring out and drilling down into the terms and the things that we wanted to monitor. I would say it's complex, but not needlessly complex. Just be prepared to spend a little time getting yourselves up and running. The main recommendations that I would provide to anybody who's considering onboarding Meltwater, remember that it costs money, it's not cheap. Anything you want that might be a little bit above what they offer right outside the box is going to cost you incrementally, so you have to be prepared to spend the budget on it. It also doesn't provide you with a level of specificity that I would've expected given the price point. For instance, we share a name with another institution in the space. There were instances where we were getting monitoring and alerts from that organization, and weren't really able to do anything to address that. It would almost appear as if we had to create a custom solution that would've cost an exorbitant amount of money to address that.