By Jamie Sturgeon | June, 20, 2009Matthew Corbett was travelling home to Boston from New York in 2005 when the idea struck.
The long-time executive headhunter for the wireless industry had finished reading The Wisdom of Crowds, a new book by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki that was capturing the imagination of many at the time, Mr. Corbett included.
What if the book's thesis — that aggregated group knowledge was more accurate than individual — could be brought to bear on the top minds of global telecommunications, he thought.
"Wouldn't it be amazing if we could capture the collective intelligence inside this community?" he asks almost five years later. Within a year, he launched INMobile.org, an exclusive online social-media site that has been nurturing the concept ever since.
Starting out with about 200 carefully screened members, INmobile membership has grown by more than ten fold. Mr. Corbett says the site is subscribed to by the chief executives of some of the world's fastest growing digital startups and tier-one carriers and handset makers.
INmobile is not alone in providing a platform for business leaders and corporate influencers. There is a growing number of exclusive, velvet-roped sites that are facilitating deals and advancing ideas. Groups like A Small World and Decayenne boast memberships of several thousand of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.
In short, social media is gaining credibility with those above the din of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
As an example, Mr. Corbett points toward a discussion unfolding on INmobile right now on the rise of Web-equipped smartphones that is being moderated by a former senior vice-president of marketing for Finnish wireless giant Nokia, still the No.1 maker of the devices globally.
"Social networks are of value to senior executives as well as teenagers," Mr. Corbett says. "The fundamental values are still important; they get access to their peer group; they still want to appear smart in their peer group and they still want to give and take information."
"There's real value in that," says Kenneth Hardy, professor of marketing at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. "You get value when you get people at similar levels somewhere where they can share the good stuff — the real stories — in trust."
Yet INmobile is more than a platform for broad discussion, Mr. Corbett says — INmobile is producing what he calls "genuine predictive data" on the direction that the wireless industry is heading in.
The organization just wrapped up its first surveying exercise that asked 100 hand-picked senior executives from Canada and the U.S. what industries will be most affected by the shift to mobile Internet now taking place.
"When you talk to a hundred experts, and 60 per cent of them say one thing, the likelihood of that happening is so high," Mr. Corbett says. He plans to conduct a similar exercise with European executives this year, marry the two sets of data and release it to industry players for free.
The largesses may not last long though, Mr. Corbett says. "You come back to me in six months and I might say there is a business there."
Real value, indeed.
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