Syneos Health^® (Nasdaq:SYNH) is the only fully integrated biopharmaceutical solutions organization. The Company, including a Contract Research Organization (CRO) and Contract Commercial Organization (CCO), is purpose-built to accelerate customer performance to address modern market realities. They bring together approximately 28,000 clinical and commercial minds with the ability to support customers in more than 110 countries. Together they share insights, use the latest technologies and apply advanced business practices to speed customers’ delivery of important therapies to patients. To learn more about how they are Shortening the distance from lab to life^®, visit syneoshealth.com or subscribe to their podcast.

Having been in PR for over 20 years, I've used pretty much all the different legacy platforms out there. What I often found with these platforms was that most of them were clunky in terms of the search and navigation experience. 

In the legacy systems we’ve used, we had to first go in and look at a reporter's beat, and then separately run searches on Google to actually see what those reporters were covering at the moment. The process to truly identify the right reporter to pitch meant looking in a couple different places. Muck Rack has helped to solve that issue.

The truly game-changing functionality that Muck Rack offers is pulling news feeds into reporter profiles. It’s easy to browse recent articles and review coverage to see if a reporter would truly be interested in your pitch. The ability to build a media list from user-generated search terms also helps media pros can understand who is writing about a trending topic quickly and easily—no need to filter and sort to gauge what media is covering a specific topic. That helps our team jump on trends and insert our clients into that national dialogue. 

Now after having just renewed with Muck Rack for the second year, I can confidently say it's been a great experience. We've even seen demand for user access for different people at our organization increase substantially in recent months, which is great. 

Media Research & List Building

As I mentioned, one of the major differences that sets Muck Rack apart from other legacy platforms is how easily you’re able to search journalists and their recent coverage. This feature allowed us to shift our methodology when creating media lists. We can search by beat and look at who is writing breaking news and covering certain stories and target those journalists. It helps us to look at different sections of reporters and ensure we’re doing comprehensive outreach.

Another defining feature is how up-to-date the information within the Muck Rack platform is. We have hundreds of media lists for various clients and we know they’re constantly being updated. 

We recently started using the Job Updates feature where we’ve set up alerts for specific clients and their core media list. Now we can proactively share an update on a weekly basis about any reporters who have moved and where they’ve moved to. When you have 40+ reporters to keep an eye on and can get all of that information in one simple alert, it’s extremely helpful. 

Team Collaboration

An unexpected benefit we’ve discovered while using Muck Rack is how easy it is to be transparent across our entire team. We may have several people working on different pitches and stories at any given time, and they may be looking to reach out to the same journalists. Within Muck Rack, we can very quickly understand the media outreach another person is doing to avoid stepping on any toes.  

It’s also great for training purposes. It’s very easy to see how a colleague is approaching a media list or how they tackle their outreach efforts. From there, we can share best practices and lessons learned.

Pitching 

I find the in-platform pitching functionality extremely helpful and now our entire organization is set up to use it. We’ve configured it so all our emails are coming directly from Syneos Health as opposed to a do not reply email address. 

The tool is user-friendly. Being able to upload a pitch to Muck Rack in advance and customize it so easily has allowed us to share large announcements quickly without being boxed in by the constraints of Outlook. 

I think the pitching tool is quite revolutionary in PR because it provides the analytics behind your outreach. By pitching through the tool, we can see who read a pitch, what subject line is working best and who is our hottest lead to follow up with.

 Pitching in-platform helps you work smarter and more efficiently.

Monitoring & Reporting

We’ve been using Coverage Reports to understand how and when our client is being mentioned in the media as well as to showcase our proactive media placements. 

Within the tool we can pull in all of the articles that we placed proactively and very easily see their unique visitors per month, the reach, the headline, the journalist; and best of all, it’s all in one place. 

This is a huge innovation over the way we used to handle reporting with other systems. It’s not using a Word document to save all your media clips; it’s not using an Excel spreadsheet to track your mentions. Instead you have this online database that can instantaneously pull in the different data sources you need. It’s definitely made us more efficient. 

1. In addition to media results, what are some of the other benefits you’ve experienced using Muck Rack? 

I think overall efficiency has been a major benefit. Being able to go from page to page and access such a wide breadth of information so quickly in the system is a huge time saver. We’ve saved significant amounts of time by being able to analyze a reporter's coverage with the click of one button. 

I think the monitoring tool has been fantastic, because we've all had our fair share of issues with Google Alerts and either setting them up and not receiving them in a timely manner or not receiving the right things. Having a Muck Rack Alert set for a specific group of journalists on a specific topic and knowing we’re going to get that coverage consistently has given us a whole new peace of mind.

2. What has your experience been like working with the Muck Rack customer success team?

The customer success team is Muck Rack’s secret weapon—they are so responsive and I feel like they're truly part of my extended team. They do everything from Boolean logic search terms for us to setting up monitoring reports to working on more custom tailored solutions for our organization. They truly are fantastic.  

During the summer months we’ve started doing “Muck Rack Mondays,” where we host special education sessions for all the new graduate trainees at the organization to get them up to speed quickly on how to use the system. We've worked together with our rep Tracy to make it really fun by offering Muck Rack swag to anyone who attends three or more sessions. But I think that goes to show it’s not just customer service. It’s more. 

3. What would your job be like if your team didn’t have Muck Rack?

It would be extremely challenging. I think the database and additional tools offered by Muck Rack are must-haves to be a successful PR professional. Without it, I think I would be less successful and I’m sure I would not be able to garner as many media wins as I do now. Muck Rack helps me work smarter rather than harder by cutting down the time it takes me to perform essential job tasks while improving the quality of the work I do.