I went to print something off Mahalo yesterday and it didn’t have a “Print This” button–which causes a bunch of annoying ass problems with stuff getting cut off or printed out of order. And instead of getting frustrated and leaving, I remembered something: I could just email Jason and he’d probably fix it.

And that’s what he did, he responded and cc’d me on his email to the development staff. THAT is the way to establish a business. Sure, he’s the CEO, but is his time better spent in those Santa Monica lunch meetings (where I know for a fact that very little happens) or interacting with the people who actually use the product?

That guy–the accessible guy the audience turns to when they have a problem, he never existed before. He’s not a middleman, he is the man. This is new and it’s pretty fucking easy to be that guy. It’s responding to emails, posting your contact information, contributing for free to communities and adding value, it’s about embracing instead of infiltrating. Look at Jason, he thought that del.icio.us would be a big source of traffic for Mahalo so he has his own incredibly active account there and now he can leverage that in any number of ways. I’m one of those guys at Rudius. I’m 20 years old, I wasn’t entitled to be but I went ahead and did it. And now, it helps me at the Agency because I have an idea about how these communities work and what they need. You can be that guy at whatever company you work at too. Find someone to protect you as you develop and build–or do it on your own behind the scenes (it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission). People who control assets don’t get fired and if they do, they still walk away owning something.

Remember Robert’s 5th Law: So much depends on your reputation–guard it with your life. Getting to be that guy is easy, staying there is hard. Having just that tiny bit of knowledge creates all sorts of pressure from people to exploit it. Like I said before, they’ll want the benefits without paying the cost–to have cede and control at the same time. They don’t care about you or the audience, they only care about now. Think about it, just 3 years of blogging made Steve Rubel more powerful and recognizable than the owner of the national corporation he worked for. It would be short-sighted to sell out now or think that your leveraged as peaked. As always, you only get to cash in your chips once, so do it right.

In honor of this utterly stupid article from Slate that called evolutionary psychology a pseudo-science, I thought I’d post the two most dangerous fallacies: Naturalistic and Moralistic.

The Naturalistic Fallacy is the tendency to think that because something is, it ought to be. The fallacy is that something being natural or part of human nature doesn’t make it right. The rage you’d get filled with thinking of your partner with someone else might be biologically influenced, but that doesn’t justify acting on it. Human morality doesn’t care if nature “allowed” something, only that it doesn’t approve of that behavior now.

The Moralistic Fallacy is the opposite–it says that since something is wrong, it couldn’t possibly be natural. Often it implies that these things are societal creations and “if we would all get along” they would go away. You might find it really sad that people go to war, but obfuscating the influence doesn’t change anything. People lie, cheat and steal everyday and have benefited from the behavior since the beginning of human history. If morality is to be more than words, it has to understand where the resistance comes from.

The Naturalistic Fallacy is a rationalization and the Moralistic is a delusion–both are stupid. And they both need to be avoided.

If you’ve ever passed a movie shoot, I’m sure you found it as impossible as I have to find out what movie they were actually filming. What is the reason for this? Why all the self-important secrecy? I think this might be another “but we’ve always done it this way.”

To me, this where you create a meaningful relationship between the product and the consumer: “Oh hey, this is the preview for that movie we watched them shoot down the street.” Capturing people’s attention when they are actually interested is a lot easier than when they are trying to do something else. If I were in charge, every truck, every shirt and every camera would have the movie title plastered all over it. But that of course is how Hollywood works–they’d rather pay a half-million dollars for a radio ad than stencil the transportation outside the shoot.

Marketing is about teasing and then reaffirming–hearing people talk and then seeing a lengthy article about it a few months later or seeing a celebrity wearing a logo and then finally identifying it with a brand when you see it in a store. And it is the inability to see things long term–“we need privacy, we can’t have fans bothering us“–that holds people back from doing the little things that add up to a bankable connection.