CyberAlert offers all-in-one media monitoring solution

CyberAlert's all-in-one media monitoring tool monitors more than 55,000 local, national, and international online news sources and social media channels.

CyberAlert's all-in-one media monitoring tool monitors more than 55,000 local, national, and international online news sources and social media channels such as blogs, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, video sharing sites, Twitter, and Facebook. Monitoring of live closed-caption text and video of TV news programs is available in all 210 US markets. Daily clip reports, analytics, and a clip-management platform are included.

National monitoring is $398 per month. Worldwide monitoring is $498 per month. Both include unlimited users. There are no per-clip fees and long-term contracts are not required.

Privately held.

Sami Mesarwi, assistant director of marketing and PR at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, has been using CyberAlert for about two years.

How do you use it?
We use it heavily for monitoring to see how the museum is being mentioned in the news. We get an email update each day with mentions based on a string of queries that we previously identified.

Because CyberAlert is great with these daily email updates, we typically use those to click on each link to go to the respective webpage/video preview of the mention our museum gets. If we need some additional information in regards to these mentions, we log on to CyberAlert's website and learn more about them. Mentioned can be grouped among the different media types such as video, website, social media, and more.

If there's a problem, I typically go to the website first to see if it's an easily answerable question. Otherwise, I'll email or call our customer service representative. He generally gets back to me within a few hours.

How does it serve your business needs?
The best way it serves us is by letting us know how the museum is being perceived.

The alerts we get include news coverage as well as mentions of the museum on blogs and Twitter. There have been a couple of instances in which we were able to better serve our patrons and provide better customer service after seeing how we were being mentioned on social media channels.

Media coverage tends to be more neutral and fact based, whereas opinions will show up in mentions on social media channels and that's important. We want to make sure we go out of our way to please our patrons, and this helps us learn more about how we can do that. It also helps us learn more about who's coming to visit the museum.

Our recently expanded Hall of Paleontology opened in June, and it was huge news. It made local, regional, and even national news. In monitoring the media coverage the hall received, it was great seeing the reach of many of the publications and the breakdown of different media types. In an age where social media has grown so rapidly, it was also great to see people talking about our new hall via Twitter. Response to the new hall garnered from our patrons was overwhelmingly positive.

It's Web-based.

What are the main benefits?
Ease of use.

The alerts are very detailed and easy to read. Some other products we've used were broader. CyberAlert catches a lot more and breaks down mentions into different groupings such as social media, print, and TV.

It's a great value. It seems to be less expensive than other services and you still get a lot out of it. Being a nonprofit, that's important for us.

Customer service is easy to get in touch with if something does go wrong.

What are the main drawbacks?

None. We stay with them because they're good at what they do.

What would you like to see improved / added?

We decided we wanted previews of videos we were monitoring, in addition to just transcripts. CyberAlert added that on very quickly, but it would be nice if the previews weren't something you had to add on.

Honestly, it already seems better than many other services.


Vocus' PR Suite: Software provides news, blog, and social media monitoring, a media database of more than 400,000 journalists and bloggers, analytics, and press release distribution.

Meltwater: Products include an online and social media monitoring tool; a media contact database, media planner, editorial calendars, and reporting tools.

BurellesLuce: Provides media outreach, monitoring, and reporting.

Cision: Provides an all-in-one monitoring product that covers social and online media, print, and broadcast outlets, and delivers analytics.

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