Hubspot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah have synthesized, condensed and packaged what I believe is one heck of a book on the new reality of lead generation. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs is written in a style that makes it extremely accessible to the smallest of businesses and gets my highest recommendation as a must read.

Brian was a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast not long ago – click to have a listen.

The overriding premise of the book is to persuade readers to come to grips with the fact that the old ways of lead generation, shouting and broadcasting, have given way to being found – by producing something that will be found online and is worthy of people talking about. No surprise here that they too think every small business should be producing content on a blog. One of my favorite ideas in this vein is the notion that we as marketers must start looking at our jobs as half publishing, half marketing.

The website or blog is the hub of an inbound marketing strategy while social media activity creates the outposts and plays a role in the creation of inbound links. The book certainly supports everything the two have been building over at Hubspot, and that’s no surprise, but I was pleasantly surprised with some ideas in the book’s final chapter. Particularly one that addresses hiring Digital Citizens as employees. The grading scale for this is pretty fascinating.