Our use of Basecamp and Highrise borders on religion. Seriously, we use Basecamp not only to manage our clients’ projects, but to administer the entire company. Marketing plan, in there. Accounting, in there. Brand guidelines, in there. It goes on and on. We leverage the Highrise CRM for all relationships with vendors, friends, customers, prospects and each other. Highrise tasks keep us running like a well-oiled machine, which is why today’s announcement boggles the mind.
37signals appears to have sold out with today’s release of Twitter integration with Highrise. Now all 10 of my clients that Tweet can have their daily routine captured in Highrise. This introduces noise, a cancer, into our CRM with little benefit. So Jason Fried and the gang don’t have time to add a long-requested feature allowing API users to tag customers and prospects, but instead jumped on the bandwagon. For a company that prides itself on being a leader, this feels a lot like a follow.
Why we care. We recently started to amp up our use of Highrise by integrating through the API to our online marketing campaigns. It’s great. We send targets to a personalized microsite, they click buttons, roll over rollovers and opt-in for goodies and information. All of this activity can now be pushed into Highrise, building a really solid customer/prospect profile for later marketing and sales touches. Awesome!
For example, we run this cool Hotel-themed campaign. If recipients opt-in we add them to Highrise, but because we can’t tag them we run the risk of sending the same campaign to the same person twice. Today’s API forces us to play Twister to extract the data. It’s so cumbersome that we keep a spreadsheet offline to make sure we don’t have campaign dups. If we were running only one campaign that might be acceptable, but when you run 5 or more campaigns simultaneously it’s overwhelming.
We think the guys and gal at 37signals are usually on their game, but what were they thinking? Nobody’s perfect. I know we aren’t, but we expect more from the inventors of Basecamp and Highrise.
