Earlier this year, I was invited to contribute content for a new business book on social media. That book, The Social Media MBA, is now done and dusted as it were and will be in bookshops and online in January 2012 in the UK and in March 2012 in the US.

Not another book about social media, you may exclaim! Indeed, if you search the key phrase “social media” in Books on Amazon UK, you’ll get the ridiculous number of over 242,000 results. I stopped scrolling though the numbers after 80 pages of books that matched the search term, each page with 12 books.

So what makes The Social Media MBA different? Call me biased, but I think it’s largely how project creator and book editor Christer Holloman – Chairman of First Tuesday, published author, public speaker and blogger for Sky News – approached it from the outset and the result he got: essentially, he crowd-sourced the content by finding through a mix of research and requests for recommendations who would be credible creators of the content he was seeking.

From the description on the publisher’s page:

[…] Whatever continent, industry, company size, current degree of social media adoption or your job title, the purpose of this book is to inspire you to see how you can raise the bar further to reap new rewards. It will give you the tools to make a difference to your organisation’s social media strategy development and delivery going forward.

In addition it will also give you more intellectual support and confidence to discuss social media on a higher level with peers, inspire colleagues or negotiate and create support for increased investments from your leadership team.

In The Social Media MBA editor Christer Holloman has crowd sourced 15 thought leaders from 4 continents to offer an exceptional educational programme written for experienced social media professionals just like you.

The book also includes case study examples from the likes of Dell, Kodak, GlaxoSmithKline, Phillips and more.

In addition, online communities are springing up. There’s The Social Media MBA Alumni group on LinkedIn. There’s a Twitter hashtag #socialmedia_mba. A book website is in development (it currently redirects to the LinkedIn group) that will include details about each of the content contributors. And Christer plans to interview each of those contributors for feature blog posts for Sky News Tech Talk.

All great startups. Meanwhile, you can pre-order your copy now (lower price at Amazon).

The Social Media MBA: Your Competitive Edge in Social Media Strategy Development and Delivery by Christer Holloman.

Publisher: Wiley
Hardcover, 272 pages
Published January 2012 (UK), March 2012 (USA)
ISBN: 978-1-1199-6323-3

Also purchase (pre-order) online at Amazon US, Amazon Canada (published in February 2012), or Amazon UK. Unfortunately, there are no Kindle editions.