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In Their Own Words: Group Nine Media’s Favorite Muck Rack Features

Newsletters

One of the biggest timesavers for us within the Muck Rack platform is the Newsletter feature that allows us to directly send a daily digest email to our leadership team.

Prior to using Muck Rack, I was in charge of compiling our press clips for a while. At the time, that meant having to reformat them all to fit our template and manually adding them to an email to send off to the team.

With Muck Rack’s Newsletters feature, we’re able to set the date range we want to gather press coverage from, which for us is daily, and it will automatically import coverage reports for all five of our brands, plus the Group Nine brand. So essentially we’re getting six daily coverage reports generated dynamically for us.

With the click of a button we can decide which articles we want to include or exclude, and all of the data formats right into our customized template complete with our logo on top.

We even created a “Tweet This” section where we can drop our corporate Group Nine tweet links right there for leadership to see and retweet, so they can stay on top of industry trends and updates.

Within minutes, we’ve created a nice, digestible nightly newsletter with all the important updates that our executives need.

Media Research and Lists

At Group Nine, we have five very distinct brands, each operating within their own category.

What really piqued my interest with Muck Rack is the fact that you can easily search Twitter bios for reporters and TV personalities, and use that information to tailor your media lists and pitching.

If we’re working on a pitch for The Dodo, we’re most likely aiming to target dog and animal lovers. But on the Thrillist side, they host amazing, niche-specific events all across the country, such as a hot dog event or a food tasting. Each of those niches is made up of its own subset of journalists who cover those beats and the audiences who follow them.

Recently, for Thrillist we held an event called Taco Knockout where we curated the best tacos from the New York City area. We then invited attendees to rank their personal favorites, and eventually crowned a winner as the Best New York City Taco.

I had the idea to search Muck Rack for reporters who mentioned being taco lovers and taco enthusiasts in their Twitter bios, and it created a really interesting way to pitch new people with something they’d actually be interested in. Maybe they’re not necessarily a food writer, but they could blur those lines of the lifestyle area, or be an influencer who’s obsessed with tacos. And that’s the kind of person we really wanted to reach.

Muck Rack Alerts

Prior to Muck Rack, I tried using Google Alerts for a short while, and found they’re just not timely or reliable enough.

For me, it’s important to know what’s happening at any given moment, whether there is a crisis brewing or just positive coverage you want to know about right away to share with your leadership team.

With Muck Rack Alerts, we get an instant update when there’s media coverage about one of our brands. Getting those email alerts right to our inbox in real-time is invaluable to us.

Fast Questions with Pierce White

1. What was life like before Muck Rack?

Right around COVID, we switched to Meltwater for a minute. I quickly regretted the decision. I told my boss, “We have to do whatever we can do to get back on Muck Rack."

2. What other benefits have you experienced from Muck Rack?

Honestly, I think one of the biggest successes we’ve had is the Newsletter feature. If you think about it, spending an hour and a half on one thing—that’s more than an eighth of your work day. Getting that down to 10 minutes is crucial. No one has enough time in the day, and that has been a huge cost saver for us as a company.

Outside of that, I would say the ease of which you’re able to find reporters and, more often than not, you can easily find their actual email address listed. In other tools I’ve leveraged before, it would be the generic editor’s email address for every contact, which was useless.

3. How would you describe your team’s experience and workflow on Muck Rack in three words?

Fast, current, visual

4. What would your job be like if you didn’t have Muck Rack?

Life without Muck Rack would be extremely challenging and frustrating. If you aren’t able to find the correct email address for a reporter, or not getting alerts from press hits at major national publications—it’s like doing your job blindly.

5. What would you tell other companies considering using Muck Rack?

I’m a huge proponent of Muck Rack overall, and I definitely think it's a worthwhile investment. It’s an extremely user friendly tool, and I think the team has been really receptive to feedback as well. Muck Rack is great and it makes a PR professional's job 100 times easier.

6. What has your experience been like working with Muck Rack’s customer success team?

I really like that I'm able to communicate directly on the platform itself using the chat feature, and someone always gets back to me in a very timely manner. I think that's key. If we have an idea for a new feature or a question about an article that didn’t come through, Muck Rack is on it and is always super helpful.