Highrise Set to Rock the Contact Management Biz

Highrise is a brand new contact management/CRM tool that will soon be released by 37 Signals. If you’re not familiar with 37 Signals, they are the brain trust behind awesome tools like Backpack, Campfire and Basecamp. Highrise is a tool that’s designed both for groups and individuals. It is basically a place for you to track and share all of your key relationships.

Jason Fried from 37 Signals gave me an early look at the product. There’s more on their blog. As is par for the 37 Signals crew, Highrise is impressive. It is a particularly invaluable, simple, lightweight tool for PR, marketing or sales professionals. It streamlines a key part of the business that requires lots of tracking.

Further, while I can’t disclose pricing, I assure you it will rock the media contact management business, which includes big vendors like Bacons MediaMap and Vocus. Unlike these other vendors, however, Highrise does not come with media data. You need to upload it into the system. So it could be a great complementary product that lets PR teams track their key folks more closely, either by themselves or within a small work group.

Each Highrise screen can include contact notes, tasks, images, recent emails and more. This last part is awesome, particularly for PR pros. Everyone on a team can bcc: a special Highrise email address for the page that tracks a particular journalist they are following. You can do this right in Outlook and your emails - as well as others -  will automatically get attached to the page. There’s also a special dashboard that brings all the information together. (See screen grabs below.)

In addition, the platform includes rich tagging capabilities, contact groups, search and more. I have long been a fan of 37 Signals Backpack product. Backpack and Gmail - which I combine by the way - run my busy life.  This product is a winner for individuals and teams. Further, if 37 Signals can begin to integrate this baby with Campfire, align with a data partner or two, it will radically change the PR business and allow greater collaboration between clients and teams. Kudos to Jason and the crew.