On the back of Adam’s post about Socialprise, I read the white paper from InsideView. Like Adam, I was attracted to the term Socialprise. Unfortunately, after reading the white paper, I’m a little less enthusiastic. Here’s why.

I believe that social media and social networking are about engagement. More than anything, they provide the opportunity for conversation. In many cases, the true value lies in the fact that these conversations can now happen between people who would never have been able to converse before. Boundaries have disappeared: geographical; earnings levels; skills levels; subject matter. To name just four.

Engagement in social media is always two-way. You give; you recieve. Receiving may be take a number of forms, from learning through to making a sale. To approach it solely from an ‘I want’ point of view, however, not only leads eventually to talking to yourself in a closed room but is also a wasted opportunity. For you. For your company.

So where does InsideView’s Socialprise application SalesView fit in? Well, for a start, it’s an application, which doesn’t bode well for engagement. It sits on top of a company’s CRM system, too, which immediately rings alarm bells. Why? Because CRM is an interruptive database. (Many individual sales people will tell you that CRM is not a sales tool; that CRM is something imposed on the sales process by company financial departments. Colin Wilson at FirstBorder writes often and well about how CRM is actually part of what he calls the ‘Sales Prevention Zone’ in many companies. Disclaimer: I used to work with Colin.)

So, you have an application doing something with social media interacting with a CRM system. That smells like a Meatball Sundae to me.

I think the fundamental problem is that InsideView have started at the corporate level and don’t see sale people as indivdiuals. They use an individual sales guy in their white paper but he’s presented really as a face for CRM. He’s also called Bob, which will bring back memories of a misguided application created by Microsoft some years ago. If Bob was a real salesman trying to make his number – treating every sales period as a new start-up – he would understand that the value of the social aspect of ’socialprise’ was paramount: the social prize.

I get the feeling that SalesView is a territory management tool that gives the sales person one more reason not to engage in the conversation. It’s like a get-rich-quick scheme for sales professionals: “You know social media is out there but you don’t have the time or the wherewithal to get involved. Plug in our magical bots and alerts and you’ll be making bigger sales more often. Buy one today.” Snake oil.

If the interactions of social media were static and consisted merely of people posting their needs and wants, a Socialprise application could work. But then social media would not be social media but simply a collection of web-based wish lists that sales people could plunder for opportunities. Either InsideView is missing something or I am.

For a rather more positive outlook on Socialprise applications and SalesView, I think it’s only fair that I point you to Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb.