By Chris Bucholtz

It may be a dangerous thing to coin a word too early, lest others get a hold of it and water down the meaning to the point where it no longer can be defined and thus loses its power. I suspect few are quite as aware of this as Rand Schulman, the CMO at InsideView, who finds himself now nuturing and guarding the new word “socialprise” (which was coined by InsideView’s Director of Product Management Marc Perramond, just to give credit where it’s due). Socialprise is a great word – a combination of “social networking” and “enterprise” to form a term describing “a natural convergence of social media and enterprise applications, and emerging as a mash-up of both the information and user experience of these previously separate universes. Socialprise applications enable organizations to discover and distill highly relevant information from an expanding sea of structured and unstructured data sources and present it in the meaningful context of specific business processes,” as Perramond wrote on his own blog .

Now, as Perramond pointed out, the word’s being used in a lot of places to describe a lot of things – some of them not really so socialprise-y, to coin an adjective which I hope dies with this blog post.

Schulman, who caught Perramond’s offhanded use of the word in a white-boarding session, is flattered but still defensive of socialprise. “It’s not this generalized, macro set of applications,” he said. “And it’s not just the application – it’s the relationships between emtities that an application may enable.”

Here’s an example: InsideView announced an agreement with Jigsaw this morning that deepens the relationship between the two companies and further integrates data from Jigsaw’s contact and company information directory into SalesView, InsideView’s flagship business search and intelligence application. (You can read more about InsideView and SalesView here and here.) It’s an interesting addition; the more sources of data InsideView can draw from that have an aspect of vetting by the larger community, the more accurate a picture of the truth that SalesView can deliver.

See – social networking tools, being used to generate value for the enterprise: socialprise. Now, when the term’s being stuck on other stuff – cloud computing, or a company blog, or on an automated marketing effort – it may be off the mark. Or it may be right on the mark. It depends. And that’s what makes it tough to maintain socialprise’s integrity as a word with a distinct meaning to it.

It’s such a good word that I hope it can survive the gestation period of the technology it describes. Part of the issue is that the vision for these applications is still rather indistinct for a lot of their target audience members, and for a variety of reasons (I’ll write about a study that examines them next week). As that vision morphs it’s only too easy for the meanings of the words around them to morph, too. I sincerely hope “socialprise” won’t morph into a catch-all with no specific meaning – the word is too cool, and the concept is too important.