Our Ten Recommended Business Book Gifts, 2012

For those of you who celebrate, we are officially just 8 days away from Christmas. For a lot of people, that means it’s really sinking in how many presents you want to give and how little time you have to gather everything! Well, we thought we’d help make your job a little easier. If there’s a special business person in your life and you know they love to read, we would highly recommend any of these ten books as gifts. By the way, none of the links below are affiliate links, these are just our recommendations!

1. Marketing in the Round: Authored by Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich, Marketing in the Round is a big picture marketing book that discusses important issues like how to bust silos in your organization, how to integrate your marketing tactics, and more. Published earlier this year, the content is strong and still fresh!

2. Social Media ROI: Authored by Olivier Blanchard, this book goes into great detail about how to measure your social media marketing efforts, but it also treats managing social media in your company, who should be responsible for what, and how to nurture a social media marketing campaign. It’s a great read.

3. Social Media Strategist: The author of this book is Christopher Barger, who was in charge of social media for GM at the time that GM declared bankruptcy. Barger got a lot of credit for how he and his team handled that situation, and he incorporated a lot of that experience and wisdom into this book. This content is a great partner to Social Media ROI – we recommend sending them as a pair!

4. The Now Revolution: Written by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund, this book takes one small part of today’s business world – shifting your company into a new era – and breaks it down step by step. There is a lot of good information in this book about how to hire for culture, why that’s important, and how you can leverage your entire organization in your efforts to succeed.

5. Winning the Story Wars: Authored by Jonah Sachs, this book does an excellent job of dissecting the importance of storytelling in today’s business world. What exactly does that mean? Sachs explains that in order to really get your customers (and prospects) behind you, you need to enmesh them with a compelling story, something that will draw their attention. He uses a lot of powerful examples to drive this point home, which also makes his point more readily accessible.

6. The Hidden Wealth of Customers: If your favorite business person is looking for ways to increase sales in 2013, this is a great gift to give them. Bill Lee outlines how you can make the most of all of your customers, and that means not just focusing on the ones who spend the most money with you, but also the ones who most often refer you to other people. How can you create environments where those referrers can reach other people? This book explains that and more.

7. The Commitment Engine: If you visited our blog over the last few months, you would know that The Commitment Engine was a book we found extraordinarily thought-provoking. Published this year, this book is more about the art of balancing work with life, feeding the entrepreneurial soul, and finding your business purpose. We’d go so far as to call this book the sophisticated chicken soup for the business person’s soul. John Jantsch is the author of this one.

8. Social Marketology: If your favorite business person likes looking at big pictures issues from different perspectives, this book, authored by Ric Dragon, is the book for you. We actually wrote a post awhile back calling into question one part of this book that we disagreed with slightly, but Ric, being a good sport, came over and engaged in a good discussion with us. Overall the book is extremely enjoyable and informative, not to mention one that offers a unique, refreshing approach to marketing!

9. Winning the Customer: Before he became a well-respected author, Lou Imbriano worked for the New England Patriots, in their marketing department. He has the Super Bowl rings to prove it! Lou learned a lot about customer service in his role with the Patriots, just as he learned a lot about customer service in his little corner of the world where he grew up, and he passes all of that information along in this excellent, easy-to-read book. Full of no-nonsense wisdom and actionable ideas, this is the perfect gift for that football fan who is also looking for business inspiration.

10. How Remarkable Women Lead: If the business person you know happens to be a woman, this book may be an unexpected but much appreciated gift. This book outlines how women throughout the business world (and the world in general) have approached business, leadership roles, success, failures, and more. It offers tips to men on how to work with women, how women can better work with men and other women, and much more. The authors of this book are Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, and Geoffrey Lewis.

Those are our ten recommendations. Of course, you could always buy your favorite business person a Kindle with any of these books pre-loaded, but we don’t want to get you too excited.

What would you add to this list?

Note: We wrote this post before the horrible events of Friday, December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut. We hope this post does not come off as thoughtless or trivial in the wake of those events. On the right side of this website we have a fundraising widget for the Sandy Hook PTA – feel free to donate there if you wish.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phing/2096273707/ via Creative Commons