Customer interfacing. Mass customization. Out-of-the-box (probably soon to be out-of-the-octagon) thinking. These are the jargon-compliant phrases for these digital times, and the themes for solving the problems that new technologies may bring. But, sometimes, something simpler is all that is needed. Sometimes, just plain common sense and good old-fashioned creativity are required.

There are a million stories in cyberspace. This is just one.

Last year, a well-known restaurant chain learned that a message board on an obscure Web page had decided that its constituents would be interested in public restrooms where activities beyond those normally associated with restrooms could be conducted with some degree of safety. Oh, OK, let's not be coy—we're talking about sex in the restrooms.

Several of the chain's locations had been selected as particularly attractive havens for this activity. While management viewed itself as open-minded and digitally cool (they weren't, but they thought they were), they weren't prepared to deal with this crisis. They wondered: Was this a problem for the local managers? For security personnel? For the information-technology group? Was it even a problem?

My client decided (I love this part) that the situation presented a legal problem. If you look around, you see that lots of companies think they have legal problems on the Web. United Airlines, faced with a site where hacked-off customers complained about its service, didn't decide that it should change its approach to service; it decided that it needed to force www.untied.com to stop using the United logo. Intel did a similar thing when unhappy customers organized on the Internet. Plenty of other companies, seeing individuals using their logos on individual Web pages, wig out and decide to sue to protect their trademarks—not thinking that they would be suing their most loyal fans, people so devoted to their products that they had gone to the trouble of constructing electronic shrines to those products. Ridiculous.

When our restaurant-chain client decided it had a legal problem, it considered these alternatives:

Hire private investigators to go to the locations and determine whether "bad things were happening."

Post warning signs setting forth clear instructions on the purpose for which restrooms are to be used.

Sue the bad guys or gals running the Web site or posting the suggestions—though it wasn't clear we could even find them.

Send threatening letters to someone.

Close all the restrooms.

Engage in a huge expense to beef up security beyond the already extraordinary standards that had been set by the chain.

Engage in the even bigger expense of hiring architects to make the restrooms less inviting to those who wanted to engage in extracurricular activity there.

None of the above.

The real way to deal with Internet issues is to think about how the Web itself may provide the answers for how to deal with problems in a practical, efficient way.

Admittedly, people will sometimes do bad things that require traditional legal action. But not always. Certainly, the restaurant chain's situation didn't.

Here's what we did: We decided that the chain should make anonymous postings to the offending Web site, indicating that the restaurant chain and, in particular, the favored locations had really tightened their security. The postings suggested that all those who subscribed to the Web site should find other places to pursue their favored type of recreation. Sure enough, the problem disappeared.

Time taken to resolve problem: 12.2 seconds.

Cost: $0 (except for the time invested to poke around in the chat room a little bit).