A week or so ago, I received my author’s copies of “Tactical Transparency,” the new book I’ve co-written with John C. Havens, and even though it’s my sixth book, I felt that same old thrill the day it went on sale. I’m also very hopeful about the book’s prospects. I must have heard President-Elect Barack Obama utter the word “transparency” about 10 times during his “60 Minutes” interview this past Sunday, and a Google search shows the word has appeared about 567,000 times in the last month alone.

There’s nothing quite like good timing.

Now that the book is available, I want to let you know about a special offer that makes the purchase price worth a a bit more, point you to some resources, and extend my deepest gratitude to everybody who had a hand in getting the book from concept to publication.

The offer

First off, if you buy the book online you can go to a special site that will be available temporarily where you can enter your online order receipt number. That’ll get you an email with a link to a page where you’ll be able to download a variety of resources, including an e-book by Chris Brogan; a lengthy excerpt from Roger D’Aprix’s new book, The Credible Company (which is must-reading for anybody working in employee communications); sample chapters from Mike Robbin’s book, Focus on the Good Stuff; Jeremiah’s Owyang‘s Forrester report on corporate staffing for social computing; Jason van Orden’s Community Magnet series, a PDF covering the seven deadly sins of social media from Room 214, and (for U.S. residents) a free one-year subscription to FastCompany magazine (which I still read religiously).

Resources

The primary resource associated with the book is a blog titled (aptly), Tactical Transparency. I have to confess that John has been shouldering most of the burden of contributing to this blog, but I’ll start getting some material up there now that the book is out and the blog will (I hope) attract some more attention.

There are also some videos from a presentation John and I gave at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas this past August. Here’s the video of John and me:

You’ll find other versions of the video—including the full discussion John and I had before the presentation—at my Viddler account.

Thanks

I couldn’t possibly be too effusive in my expression of thanks to everyone who had a role in getting the book done.

First, I have to tip my hat to John C. Havens. We met when John called to ask me to co-present at a meeting—he’d be live, I’d be Skype’d in. Unfortunately, I had technical problems and couldn’t get through, leaving John hanging. In our conversation after that, though, the talk turned to the many dimensions of transparency that we hadn’t planned on talking about at the meeting, and the book concept took off from there.

I still hadn’t met John face-to-face when a publisher came on board, but we’ve seen each other several times since then. We’ve also had countless phone calls, exchanged hundreds of emails, and gotten to know each other pretty well. At this point, I’m proud to count John among my friends.

Next on the thank-you list are those who worked directly on the book’s development. First, I’d like to heap praise on Yvonne DiVita and Tom Collins ofWindsor Media Enterprises, our agents, who go well above and beyond the role an agent usually assumes. (I’ve had three agents before this; I know whereof I speak.)

On the publishing side, the International Association of Business Communicators—of which I’ve been a member for more than 30 years—played a pivotal part. IABC has a publishing partnership with Jossey-Bass, and my very good friend Natasha Nicholson, IABC’s vice president of publishing, brought the idea to the publisher. Natasha and I met for lunch with Kathe Sweeney, senior editor in the business/management group at Jossey-Bass, who also became a champion for the book. Since then, we’ve worked with many great people at Jossey-Bass (a Wiley imprint), but a special nod goes to Erin Moy, who’s handling the marketing. John, Kathe, Erin, Natasha and I had a great lunch to talk about the book at this year’s international IABC conference in New York.

Finally, there are all those who provided the substance for the book, the many who agreed to be interviewed. (All those interviews, in their entirety, are available on BlogTalk Radio, where John works as VP of business development. (The continued availability of these interviews is an example of transparency: If you read a quote in the book and wonder about its context, you can just listen to the entire interview and hear exactly how that quote was presented.)

Not everybody interviewed made it into the book, but their contributions were no less important than those who did—their observations, insights, and wisdom are unquestionably apparent in the finished product, even if specific quotes aren’t.

By the way, if you’re listed here and you never got the PDF of the review version of the book, let me know and I’ll get it off to you.

Here’s the rundown of those who took part in the interviews, in decidedly non-alphabetical order:

• Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President, Sun Microsystems
• Robert Duffy, Open Port Group, Intel
• George Faulkner, Corporate Communications at IBM
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
• Dominic Jones, Principal of IR Web Report and founder of Clarity! Communications
• Jeff Pulver, founder of Vonage and Pulver.com
• Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor for FastCompany.com
• Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers
• Alan Levy & Bob Charish, CEO & COO, co-founders of BlogTalkRadio
• Christopher Carfi, co-founder of Cerado
• Bill Sobel, Principal of Sobel Media and founder of the New York Media Information Exchange Group
• Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research
• Ludovic Fourrage, Group Program Manager for the Academy Mobile Program at Microsoft
• Sean O???Driscoll, General Manager, Customer Service and Support for Microsoft
• Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, WIRED Magazine
• Todd Defren, partner at SHIFT Communications
• Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing and Founding CEO of WOMMA.org
• Gabe Dalporto, Chief Strategy Office for Zecco.com
• Tom Foremski, author of the Silicon Valley Watcher blog
• Bob Langert, Vice President for Corporate Social Responsibility at McDonald???s
• Mike Prosceno, Head of New Media Relations at SAP
• Mike Wing, vice president of communication strategy for IBM
• Lynn Tyson, director of Investor Relations at Dell
• Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations
• John Czwartacki, Executive Director of External Communications for Verizon
• Chris Heuer, Principal, The Conversation Group
• Chris Brogan, New Media Consultant and co-founder, Podcamp.org
• Brian Solis, principal of Future Works PR
• Andrew Horowitz, President and Founder of Horowitz & Company and author of The Disciplined Investor
• Timothy Sykes, CEO, Bullship Press and author of An American Hedge Fund
• Tia-Carr Williams, CEO at EveryMedia and Chief Network Officer at http://www.novuminstitute.org
• Michael Port, nationally acclaimed speaker and author of Booked Solid
• Dave Balter, Founder and CEO of BzzAgent
• Joel Smernoff, President and COO of PalTalk
• Josh Levy, CEO, BeenVerified
• Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston
• Jonathan Vanasco, Founder and CEO of FindMeOn
• >Andrew Baron, Founder, Rocketboom
• Gerald Baron, founder of AudienceCentral and author of Now is Too Late
• Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor/Interactive for the Dallas Morning News
• Micah L. Sifry, Senior Editor, Personal Democracy Forum
• JD Lasica, founder of Ourmedia.org
• Stephanie Rogers, Director of Interactive Strategy for PARTNERS + Simons
• Anil Dash, Vice President, Six Apart
• Robert Scoble, Managing Director, FastCompany TV and co-author of Naked Conversations
• Eric Skiff, Community Evangelist at Clipmarks.com
• Paull Young, Senior Account Executive at Converseon
• Scott Ginsberg, The Nametag Guy
• Jason McClain, founder of the Institute for the Development of Evolutionary Awareness
• Andrew Kaplan, CEO at MediaMensch Networks
• Cindi Bigelow, President, Bigelow Tea
• Valorie Luther, Founder and CEO, Creative Concepts
• Sean Bohan, Advertising and Marketing executive
• Lauren Wood, Senior Program Manager, Sun Microsystems
• Matthew Knell, former General Manager, Jet Blue
• Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications, Jet Blue
• Brian Lusk, Manager of Customer Communication and Corporate Editor, SouthWest Airlines
• Bill Owen, Lead Planner in the Schedule Planning Department, SouthWest Airlines
• Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager, Microsoft

One more thing…

There have been some early write-ups of the book:

A “drive-by” review by Johnathan Fields
A blog post by Connie Crosby
A nice reference by Christie Adams, who attended the Third Tuesday event in Toronto a few weeks ago
My friend C.C. Chapman’s post announcing that he received his review copy
C.C.‘s early thoughts on the book, discussed in his terrific podcast, “Managing the Gray”
IBM’s George Faulkner announces that he’s received his review copy
A great post by Lynne d Johnson, FastCompany’s director of social media, who wrote the foreword
A brief interview that Albert Marruggi of Provident Partners conducted with me at the recent SNCR research symposium
Paull Young of Converseon talks about the book

I think that’s about enough self-promotion, don’t you? Now, back to our regularly-scheduled programming.