I want you to practice saying this to yourself:  The People Inside My Computer Are Real.

One of the biggest obstacles to helping businesses build their oline presences is their inability to accept that the Internet is a real place, populated with real people.  It still seems like a Dungeons & Dragons sort of semi-reality that has nothing to do with business.

This is part of living in a revolution:  everyone in our time has to rethink everything about the way they communicate and view the world.

Your online community — while quite different than the one you encounter at your workplace, the kids’ school, your house of worship — is just as alive.  Some of the people in it are good for you, some of them are not, some are boring, some of them even dangerous.  Just like everyone else you encounter in (wait for it, wait for it) the rest of the real world.

Good business has always been about relationships, and your Internet presence is a relationship like any other:  it offers challenges and benefits, and it needs to be maintained.

I recently made use of my Internet community to make Christmas happen for my daughter Karenna.  She is four years old, and all she wanted in the whole wide world was a Disney Princess vanity that converts into a musical keyboard.  There are no words for how obnoxious this thing is — Valley-girl pink, covered in vapid Disney faces, purple turrets, the whole bit.

The week before Christmas I hit Target and lo and behold — no vanity.

I called every Target, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart in the greater Boston area, and then the Commonwealth, and then New England. 

My kid was in love with the toy of the year. It was a week before Christmas and nobody had it.

So I took to my Twitter feed.  I posted the link to the vanity and asked my readers to check their local stores.  “If you find a store that has it, please drop me the name and location, any state. Thank you!” I wrote.

Reply Tweets started popping up.  Readers were finding it listed in their local Targets in Georgia, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Indiana, Maine, Florida. 

The whole thing reminded me of my summer in Mission Control, Houston.  Every console in that room is staffed by a single person who is communicating with a couple of hundred people through her headset.  Those people — her “back room” — are working the problem that is in front of her and providing her a constant stream of data to assist her.

So I Tweeted about that, quoting Gene Kranz from the movie Apollo 13.

“Wake up anybody you need, call your backups. We need this vanity. Let’s work the problem, people.”  As the hours passed, I kept Tweeting it.  “Me: Work your networks. Cute Husband: I don’t have any networks. Me: DAMNIT! I want solutions, not problems!”

The information kept pouring in, from all over the country, and I started dialing.  I called fifteen states in half an hour, coming up with a total zero.  They were flying off the shelves faster than Internet inventories could keep up.

“To Santa Command Back Room:” I wrote.  “None of the places you sent actually have the freaking mother-loving vanity. The Internet is a big fat liar.” 

I was about to give up.  Then this:

It was done.  She shipped it, sent me a Paypal request, and I transferred funds.

 The vanity arrived with days to spare.  We assembled it Christmas Eve and had it propped up beside the tree Christmas morning.  Ren lost her squash when she saw it, with absolutely no idea what had gone into making it happen for her.

Amanda had sent a note with it, which I tucked away in the souvenir box so that some day Ren would know who Santa really is, and how hard strangers will work to make the magic happen for a kid.

The moral of the story? — Santa is real, the Internet is real. 

And good business has always been about relationships.  Today’s businesses need to learn to nurture online relationships, to apply the same rules of give-and-take, boundaries, caution and generosity they use in the rest of their relationships.