I’m still an avid reader but my attitude towards eating has changed! Fortunately I’ve been able to pursue my love of reading even more readily, facilitated by the advent of the ebook reader. I am hearing more and more complaints though about the lack of thought provoking business books, something I have found as well. So, in an attempt to provide some help to the people out there looking for a solid book, here are the 5 books that shaped me most in my career.

1. Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.

This book encourages you to look beyond common wisdom and academics, to ask, with an open mind, the right questions to uncover life’s mysteries. It helped me think outside of the box, challenging evergreen truths, and combining data analysis with input from people.

2. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, by Howard Schultz.

In 2008, Howard Schultz decided to “pull a Steve Jobs”, returning as CEO of Starbucks after 8 years of absence. His goal was to help the company return to it’s core values. He ended up achieving profitability during one of the worst economical crises in history. I was the GM of a business servicing the financial industry in those days, and the book showed me that I wasn’t the only one with all my doubts and my fears. It also showed me that it was possible to navigate the recession, preserve and grow the business, while still maintaining my human values.

3. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

Marketing has gone through tremendous change over the last 3 to 5 years, driven by the arrival and use of new technologies by consumers. This is a solid book for anyone trying to make sense of internet marketing, and the onslaught of technology.

4. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business, by Ann Handley and CC Chapman.

This book, combined with the previous one, shaped my understanding on how online marketing helps you get found, and content marketing determines what happens once you are found. Online and Content Marketing go hand in hand, and you really can’t design a marketing strategy without addressing at least these two components.

5. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

A lot has been said about Steve Jobs, most of it coming down to how genius he was, but impossible to work for. My big epiphany reading this book was that although dysfunctional behavior is not OK for a leader, he was consistently dysfunctional, thus providing a stable environment for his people to work and thrive within. My big lesson was that if you are consistent in your behavior as a leader, no matter how bad it is, your people can rise to the occasion. If you are inconsistent and unpredictable,processes and people will start breaking down

Katleen Richardson is the President of Marketing AdvantEdge and is an experienced leader who builds integrated strategies combining research, data analysis and creative thinking. She has delivered successful solutions for the publishing, financial and telecommunications industries, as well as for conference and training companies, and professional associations. Her approach is to design customer focused, cost-effective solutions based on cross functional collaboration and results-based metrics.

The book is intended for an intermediate or advanced audience, so if you are new to SEO, you might want to read The Art of SEO or Marketing in the Age of Google first. If you are in the SEO field, there are a lot of great ideas that you can learn from this book to help your clients or your employer. Here are some of the main takeaways that I found really helpful.

Links Can Solve Most SEO Problems
Dover emphasizes the importance of links in SEO and points out that many SEO issues can be overcome by gaining more links. The SEO experts at SEOMoz estimated that about 70% of Google’s ranking algorithm has to do with links, so it is a good idea to focus a significant amount of effort on this part of SEO.

Every Page Should Be Linkworthy
Dover argues that each page on your site should be able to earn links. Adding content should add to the site’s linkjuice rather than dilute it. “Content for content’s sake is a waste of resources and a distraction for users.”

Realize that Category Pages Have A High Chance of Ranking
Category pages can provide your best shot of ranking well for a competitive phrase because linkjuice is flowing from the homepage and usually from a lot of children pages.

Disable Your Browser’s JavaScript When Reviewing A Site
Since search engines are not as effective at crawling JavaScript, disabling it on your browser can help you determine if there may be accessibility issues on a given site. Setting your user-agent to Googlebot can help detect any possible cloaking issues on a site.

Consider Buying Your Competing Websites
Roughly 90% of clicks go to the first three results, so if you are #3 for a keyword phrase and buy the sites that own the first two spots, you can get about 90% of the traffic for that keyword phrase.

Use Meta Robots to Block Pages From Engines
Meta Robots (noindex,follow) is a better option than robots.txt files because it ensures that pages are not included in the index and still pass linkjuice to other pages.

Pick up a copy of Search Engine Optimization Secrets by Danny Dover to learn more great tips. You can also check out our previous interview with Danny Dover.

Enchantment
Guy Kawasaki wrote this modern version of How to Win Friends and Influence People and talks about how to get people to like you and how to enchant your customers.

We First
Simon Mainwaring’s well received book discusses how marketers can use social media to make the world a better place. He also writes frequently at his blog at Simonmainwaring.com

We Are All Weird
In We Are All Weird, Squidoo CEO and change agent, Seth Godin discusses how businesses can cater to the diverse interests and uniqueness of each individual rather than using mass marketing that clumps all consumers together.

The Thank You Economy
Gary Vaynerchuk’s enthusiastic book on social media will energize and inspire you while also providing good arguments for why social media matters.

Marketing White Belt
Christopher S. Penn found that many digital marketers haven’t received formal training on the fundamentals of marketing and set out to fill this need with his first book. If you are a fan of the Marketing Over Coffee, you can support the show by getting this book.

Search Engine Optimization Secrets
Danny Dover, who previously managed SEO for SEOMoz, provides deep insights on what is effective in SEO from his experience doing SEO on several successful internet properties like Yelp. This book also provides a helpful explanations of SEO principles and a guide to anyone interested in building a successful SEO consultancy including sample SEO audits.

Killing Giants
Stephen Denny’s book describes how to take on the market leader in an industry including how Method was able to carve out a nice niche in a category long dominated by giants like P&G and Unilever.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness
Part of Seth Godin’s Domino Project, Dan Zarrella writes this short book about how social media works and how marketers can get the most value out of it.

The Lean Startup
While not specifically focused on marketing, Eric Ries shares a lot of great marketing advice for startups in his book. See 5 Marketing Lessons from Eric Ries and the Lean Startup.

No BS Social Media
Jason Falls is a sharp social media marketer and founder of the great social media blog Social Media Explorer. His book focuses on techniques to increase sales and profits with social media.

More interesting marketing book to consider:

Brandwashed
Martin Lindstrom, who has previously written about neuromarketing and subliminal messages, discusses how some marketers use psychological tricks and manipulation to get people to buy products.

Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen

The Old Rules of Marketing are Dead by Timothy R. Pearson

How to Market to People Not Like You by Kelly McDonald

Convert! by Ben Hunt

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper by David Sitemen Garland

The End of Business As Usual by Brian Solis

Outsmarting Google by Evan Bailyn and Bradley Bailyn

See our favorite marketing books from previous years:
9 Best Marketing Books of 2010
Best Marketing Books of 2009
Top 10 Marketing Books of 2008
See all best marketing books

Did we miss any good marketing reads from 2011? Please leave a comment below.

Many marketers agree that social media forms one of the most important and powerful components of any successful marketing strategy. That being said, it is far from the easiest proverbial ‘nut’ to crack and those really looking to be successful would do well to invest in the help of a seasoned mentor. There is a staggering amount of help out there and some vital lessons to learn, requiring no more than a little time spent in the company of the right literature. Needless to say, one on one advice is far from the most affordable commodity, making a good read the best and most accessible option by far.

Of course, it has to be pointed out that in the world of SEO and marketing, the best practices today might be entirely useless tomorrow, therefore the following rundown of some of the best books currently doing the rounds are indeed worthy of their status, though only if used in the current state of play:

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave Evans

A firm favorite among professional and amateur circles alike, this is certainly a contender for the very best of the bunch by anybody’s reckoning. Where most other books of a similar nature concentrate on the things that are run personally, such as the advantages of using social media instead of blogging for example, this is much more focused and concentrated on actual social media tactics. Indeed, the only real complaint with the book is that fact that it doesn’t really live up to its title – as the hour a day in question is not actually spent with the book, but practicing what the book teaches.

The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko

On optimistic title if ever there was one, this particular book might not fully live up to its claims for being a full on bible on the subject but is still a truly excellent choice for a comprehensive introduction to the concept and integral elements of social media optimization. Essentially, the main reason for casting doubt on the title is the fact that the book might be a little too broad based to live up to its claims.

The author spends some time talking about the history of the internet and introduces a number of elements and subjects that are not essentially related to the subject of social media. For example, the CMS Joomla is brought up which is not entirely relevant to the central theme, at least if the reader is more concerned with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. Regardless however, the strategies and suggestions included are enormously helpful and show the reader exactly what to do, rather that simply telling them what they might wish to do.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott

This is by far one of the top choices doing the rounds at the moment, offering a broad and comprehensive view on the internet and the way in which it has revolutionized the way in which the world does business. The social media inclusion is hugely helpful and has some great ideas, though the one criticism would have to be the fact that the specific ideas on how to make social media work are afforded modest detail. As an introduction to the subject however, a truly excellent choice.

Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan

The simple and straightforward reason this book makes the shortlist is that a good deal of focus is put on one of the most important tools at the reader’s disposal – which is blogging. The book explains in simple and easily digestible terms how to begin a blog and the ways in which it can be useful to a business, though offers limited coverage of the other areas of social media.

Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber

Those looking for a good introduction to the world of social media should certainly consider this book an essential purchase, which serves as a basic guide to the fundamentals for anybody new to the subject. Of course, details are a little sketchy when it comes to the complicated specifics, but as a first-timer’s guide to the business,
there really is none better.

This guest post was written by Christine Connor, who writes about marketing and social media for Upack.

The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferris, introduces a whole new concept in time planning and the ways work affects people’s lifestyles. Author Tim Ferris has mastered the art of combining powerful principles for economizing on time with outsourcing to arrive at an extremely short, while at the same time highly lucrative, work week.

This book is a must for anyone who is interested in reducing the amount of time they spend working at a job and increasing their freedom to pursue their creative interests. The book is tailor made for people in the marketing field as well as many other lines of work. In a step by step and easy to understand way, Tim points out both the reasons for going for a much lighter work load and the ways in which this can be accomplished.

Attitude Shifts

The book discusses various attitude shifts that Tim has identified which apply a revolutionary new way of looking at work and time usage. A large part of creating a dream lifestyle is finding out the attitudinal factors that are keeping an individual in the daily grind. People make all kinds of assumptions that make a work filled and moderately productive life seem inevitable. Even individuals that are making enough money from the work they do are not happy in such a lifestyle. Ferris points out that a much realer measure of success is the amount of free time one has after the work is completed. In this sense, someone making a large salary by working long hours is less wealthy than someone working much shorter hours and making only moderately less money, but who has much more free time to pursue their interests.

The 80-20 Ratio

As an example of the types of principles the book discusses, Ferris describes a ratio that can be used to reduce the amount of work an individual has to do to accomplish a certain goal. The basic idea here is that, as a general rule, about 80% of real productivity comes from only about 20% of work that is undertaken by an individual. This means that the other 80% of the work most people are involved in yields little or no result and is essentially wasted time and energy. The key is to eliminate that wasted 80%. It is not hard to see how this frees up huge amounts of time while allowing for the same amount of productivity or accomplishment.

In marketing terms this would translate into time spent making sales efforts toward unresponsive leads and pursuing strategies that do not produce high conversion rates. The 20% of marketing efforts that do work can be singled out and expanded on (without significantly increasing the workload) and the wasted effort minimized or eliminated.

Outsourcing

Another area that Tim deals with extensively in the book is outsourcing. Outsourcing is made even easier these days by the internet. The book goes over a number of different ways in which outsourcing can be used to reduce someone’s workload to almost nothing. For a marketing professional, this might include outsourcing tasks like prospect generation, telemarketing, or web optimization to others to complete. Tim demonstrates just how to do this in a variety of easy ways.

Timothy Ferris’ book is a fascinating and refreshing journey into the possibilities of what he calls lifestyle design. Whether someone is involved in marketing or some other field, this book will open the reader’s eyes to all kinds of potentials and possibilities for achieving financial success while designing a much freer lifestyle. Read it!

Marc McDermott is the Marketing Manager at Merchant Express, a provider of merchant account services and payment processing technologies with a specialized approach to accepting credit cards, merchant bankcard processing and transaction processing services. He is a SEMPO Certified SEM Professional and Google Analytics Certified Individual.

Until quite recently, Yvon Chouinard’s name wasn’t well known outside of the extreme sports community. He was respected largely as a leader in the Yosemite National Park rock climbing scene during the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1960s and the blacksmith who created new rock climbing gear that made getting up high safer than ever before. The first company he founded- Chouinard Equipment Ltd- is long gone but still enjoys a great deal of respect amongst rock climbers.

However, Let My People Go Surfing has more to say about Chouinard’s second, more popular venture. Patagonia clothing is sold in outdoor stores from the USA to France to Australia, and almost everywhere else. Sales are in the hundreds of millions of US dollars per year. It’s seen as high-end stuff, expensive but worth the money.

From the start, Patagonia was not quite your average company. It was one of the first to commit a serious percentage of their profits to environmental causes, one of the first to address health issues in the employee cafeteria, and one of the first to introduce on-site care for the children of the workers.

The book’s title reflects a real Patagonia policy. If it’s sunny and the surf is up, the workforce is free to take an afternoon off, get out there and enjoy it. They can take up to two months of paid leave per year as long as they spend it working for a not-for-profit cause. The company also offers each and every employee $2000 dollars to put towards the cost of an environmentally-friendly car.

The question most business-minded people will ask is this: How can any company afford to give away a minimum of 1% of all sales, pay for so much employee time spent maintaining hiking trails and preserving wilderness, take such good care of the workforce, and still make a profit?

Let My People Go Surfing has a lot to say about how to run an ethical company successfully (and Patagonia has not always been safely in the black), but one of the strongest messages is that environmental and social responsibility do not have to be a drain on company resources. They can be fantastic marketing assets.

Ethical consciousness has never been higher amongst the general public. In Britain, where the trend is very strong indeed, four out of every five shoppers recognize the Fair Trade symbol and know what it means. About 50% of the adult population regard themselves as ethical consumers. Even in the USA, where it’s less pronounced, more than $300 billion dollars are invested in funds that declare themselves to be socially responsible.

Chouinard’s book provides a fascinating insight into the way ethical behavior can be used to build a brand. It’s essential reading for any marketer who wants to reach out to the growing number of environmentally and socially minded shoppers out there.

Jess Spate works for Appalachian Outdoors, a Pennsylvania-based outdoor clothing and equipment store. They sell a wide range of Patagonia products, and are also involved in their own environmental and social projects.

Automatic Espresso Machines

To increase efficiency and reduce customer wait time, Starbucks switched to automatic espresso machines that resulted in a loss of “romance and theater” that was originally envisioned. Schultz helped to restore the experience by making the process more manual, so that baristas could provide more of a performance for customers.

Breakfast Sandwiches

Schultz was not a fan of the introduction of breakfast sandwiches and was animate about getting breakfast sandwiches out of Starbucks. He talked about the smell of burnt cheese overwhelming the aroma of coffee that killed the brand story of an authentic European coffeehouse. Schultz was able to get rid of breakfast sandwiches temporarily, but decided to bring them back to increase sales per transaction and after the cheese was adjusted.

Licensing Stores
Schultz emphasizes the pressure Starbucks received from Wall Street to continue to grow and this probably led to the licensing of Starbucks as mini-Starbucks in grocery stores. Schultz explains that they decided to not franchise Starbucks stores to maintain consistent quality, but Starbucks’ stores within a store are not much better. Licensed stores are staffed by the licensee’s employees, who often provide substandard service that leads to a customer experience that is inconsistent with real Starbucks stores.

No National Advertising

Traditionally, Starbucks has stayed away from national advertising through major media. Strong brand awareness, word of mouth, and the addictive nature of coffee helped Starbucks get away with not advertising as much as other major brands for several decades. However, their lack of advertising hurt Starbuck’s ability to communicate important differentiators. For example Schultz talks about how Starbucks stresses using only high quality Arabica beans rather than the inferior Robusta beans, however many customers who didn’t know this complained of a burnt taste. Schultz also talks a lot about social responsibility such as providing healthcare for all employees and buying fair trade coffee, but a lot of customers are oblivious to these efforts. Schultz began to change his thinking about advertising and hired BBDO, which has produced some effective national ad campaigns.

Instant Coffee
Schulz talks about how there was great resistance to the idea of instant coffee over concerns that it would hurt the high quality and premium positioning of the Starbucks brand. Despite Schultz’s desire to differentiate Starbucks Via from instant coffee and Starbucks attempts to create a new product category, customers still perceive it as instant coffee.

Where Starbucks’ Marketing Went Right

My Starbucks Idea

My Starbucks Idea allows people to submit their suggestions to Starbucks and ideas are voted on by the community. Listening to customers through the My Starbucks Idea community has led to helpful insights and some ideas that were implemented to improve the customer experience.

In a world where Internet marketing advice becomes obsolete in a matter of weeks, it’s rare to find a book with marketing insights and tactics that are as relevant and effective today as when they were first published nearly two years ago. Books about online marketing with this kind of an extraordinarily long shelf life are usually reserved for works that garner lofty descriptions such as “game changer”, “illuminating” and sometimes even “classic”.

In my opinion, Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel is one such book deserving of the praise “classic” as it has helped lay the ground-work for how I market my business online.

If you’re not familiar with the Six Pixels of Separation, I would plainly describe it as a play book for small business owners, entrepreneurs, or professionals that want to understand the why and at a high-level the how of content marketing in an increasingly digital planet.

At the crux of Six Pixels of Separation, Joel weighs in the importance of all the popular permutations of content marketing, including blogging, podcasting, video marketing, and social media. Joel recommends finding the style of content that best matches your individual strengths in the beginning of the process and slowly building a brand over time by attracting an audience through long-tail searches and social media.

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you’ve probably heard some of these concepts before. Just keep in mind that this was published back in 2009. Some bloggers are still treating the concept content marketing like some shiny new idea. That’s part of the reason I believe Six Pixels of Separation is deserving of classic status.

But if you’re still not convinced you want to spend time reading Joel’s 304-page masterpiece, here are what I consider to be the most important crib notes:

You are the Media

It wasn’t all that long ago you had to either have special access or lots and lots of money to get your message out. Now you can communicate for almost nothing and if you work hard and long enough, build an audience and finally a business all online. You’re lucky to be born when you were.

Attention Does Not Equal Trust

Just because you’ve managed to get 100,000 people to watch a YouTube video because you recorded your 4-year-old son kicked you in the balls doesn’t mean any of these people will ever want to buy anything from you. Keep that concept in mind before when you start envisioning your brand.

More Work, More Opportunities

The harder you work and the longer you publish content the more opportunities your business will have of succeeding. Just make sure you’re working hard on a business that actually makes sense.

The Free Economy

In my opinion, Six Pixels of Separation acts as a nice introduction to the New York Times Best Seller Free by Chris Anderson. If you’re not familiar with the concept in the book Free, Chris Anderson makes the case that it’s in the best interest of some businesses to give their products away at no cost, while focusing on monetization through back-end offers or product upgrades to make money.

Mitch Joel’s beliefs align closely with the concept outlined in Free as he encourages publishing copious amounts of free content to attract, educate, and entertain an audience. Ideally, a small percentage of this audience will eventually convert to paying customers when they’re ready.

Deeper Connections

At some point in your life, you probably wanted more information than traditional media would allow. For me back in high school, I couldn’t get enough factoids about my favorite WWF wrestlers. Developing consistent content allows you to build deeper relationships with your most hardcore fans. Two hours of Monday Night Raw once a week might be good enough for 99% of the population, but for the most passionate 1% of your audience publishing more in-depth content makes sense, especially when the top 1% of your audience could be making up for 80% of your profits.

The author Brett Alan operates an SEO reseller business at StartSEOCompany.com. Visit the website to read his regularly updated blog.

In his new book, Social Media ROI, Olivier Blanchard attempts to demystify the biggest question that sits on top of the minds of many business managers: what exactly is the ROI of social media? And more importantly, why should my business be using social media and how do we justify the investment? Blanchard, a frequent speaker on the topic, comes from a marketing and brand management background and is best known for his BrandBuilder blog.

Social media success doesn’t happen by accident.

In the first chapter of Social Media ROI, Blanchard gives us a refresher course on what social business is and why it’s important. Unlike many drab social media books (and there are plenty of them) the information presented here is well received and there’s a level of depth in the given examples that’s just not present in other books. The amount of detail presented throughout is a pleasant surprise.

The wide scope of social business

Later on in the book Blanchard dissects how social media can help sales, customer service, PR, and other specific areas of business. Real world examples of setting up KPI’s, establishing goals, and tracking progress are made. It’s easy to talk about these subjects, but I like how the author took the extra step to show us how it’s done. The fourth section of the book in particular, on measurement, is extremely detailed. Emphasis is placed on discovering the difference between what can be measured and what should be measured and what a financial and non-financial outcome looks like.

Defining ROI

The reason why many will and should pick up this book is for the section that defines exactly what ROI is and what it isn’t. ROI is simply a financial calculation, no more and no less. The problem with social media ROI is that we often get caught up trying to define it as something more than a business metric. ROI isn’t relationships or influence or anything that falls outside the realm of hard financial numbers.

Blanchard explains how ROI can’t be tracked until the return (the R) has been yielded. Here’s a quote directly from the book:

“If an executive asks you to predict the ROI of your program before you have even put it into play, before it has begun to yield results, consider it to be a trick question.”

The social media ROI question isn’t going to dissapear and it’s ever important to grasp what it really is, when it’s an appropriate part of the discussion, and the role it has in business moving forward (especially in the eyes of top tier decision makers). This is a great read for those looking for answers and clarity on the topic. Social Media ROI lives up to high expectations and is as thorough, if not more, than any other book on the topic.

Jason mKey is the senior manager of social media marketing at Sparkplug Digital, a Seattle marketing firm providing SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns.

Content Rules is a worthwhile read if you are new to marketing with web content and if you want to learn how you can leverage new media such as blogs, podcasts, and video to generate online leads that can turn into sales. The book provides a lot of practical tips that will help lower the learning curve and help you get started. There are several useful case studies at the end of the book that provide evidence of content marketing producing real results for some of the largest companies as well as small businesses. This book is packed with substance with relatively little fluff. If you are experienced in marketing with content there are still some useful ideas that can help you be more effective in content marketing.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Produce really great stuff, and your customers will share and disseminate your message for you”

Creating great content that adds value to people’s lives will encourage readers to spread your ideas through email and social channels.

”What you create online will be searchable indefinitely”

If your content is deemed worthy by Google to be kept in their index, your article or content can show up in search results years after you have created it and continue to attract customers to your site.

”Give more valuable, helpful, and remarkable content to consumers than anyone else in my field.”

By creating more valuable content than your competitors you can establish your company as a thought leader which often leads to a perception that you are an industry leader.

”The key is to reuse and repurpose. Ask yourself, ‘How can we repurpose content development effortsto yield as many assets as possible?”

If someone at your company creates a valuable presentation, the content can be repurposed as a video, a webinar, or even an re-imagined as an article or ebook.

”Your content shares a resource, solves a problem, helps your customers do their jobs better, improves their lives, or makes them smarter”

A key to creating content that people will want to read, share, and link to is to focus on adding value to people’s lives.

”Provide the information that answers your prospects’ questions and concerns.”

Creating a frequently asked question section that links to a different page for each question can be a great way to answer questions from customers. People often use search phrases in the form of a question, so your FAQ page that matches a common question can help drive search traffic to your site from people who are actively looking for a solution.

“Your video content, in particular, is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than your standard text-based content.”

This statistic supports the opportunity of creating video for high search engine visibility. Since there are a lot fewer videos than text pages on the Web, you can increase your chances of ranking in search engines by producing relevant videos.

”Adding that single call to action, Make says, tripled the number of leads HubSpot generates from its blog.”

Hubspot adds a call to action to every blog post that moves the reader closer to becoming a customer by signing up for an upcoming webinar or downloading an ebook.