Changes in media, the marketplace, and the PR industry since themid-1980s have demanded shifts in the way contacts and constituenciesare mapped. Media directories, such as Bacon's, evolved from cumbersomebooks into online databases. MediaMap became an early innovator incontent distribution and other PR tasks. And sales automation systems,like Goldmine, began to emerge with intelligence-gathering abilitiesthat excited the PR community.
As a result, contact management merged with the concept of workflowautomation, and a host of all-in-one PR solutions andexternal-relationship management tools are now ...