The FT leapt on the social media bandwaggon this week with an “online social network forum for executives in the media and technology industries”.

The forum is the first in what FT hopes will be a series of forums targeting niche industries, although at first it looks little more than your usual forum that has been around since Web 0.5. The prominent ‘Brochure Request’ tab shows just how far behind the curve the FT and their readers sit right now.

The forum is £1700 to join for the privilege of havingthe FT market their conferences to you, and to hook you into a forum with your peers that is more than likely populated by their spokespeople and researchers rather than the real thing. With a target membership of 200 the value of the interaction on the forum is going to be weak at best, most forums have a participant to lurker ratio of at 10%at most, and with the target audience being more likely to be guarded in their discussion, 1% is more likely. That leaves you listening to 2 people talking to each other.

The real value of Web 2.0 - open discussion, identifying advocates, unfettered creativity - is completely absent, and with ‘professional’  networks such as Linkedin already in place and quite active, even at a senior level it’s hard to see much value in the effort.

For an organisation that is claiming to advise industry leaders on how to make money  from these technologies it’s a pretty disappointing start.