A recent Wall Street Journal article on Web 2.0 brought home a key point for firms wanting to present themselves to this evolving and morphing mélange of business and social networking sites, of blogs and wikis in their CRM strategies: be prepared for the bad as well as the good.

Web 2.0 strips away for many organizations the comfortable and secure façade of the illusion that their products and service is the best there is, relatively insulated from what customers in general think of them thanks to what has been at this point de facto one way marketing.

These online forums and sites provide a loud, globally read, if occasionally unfair public opinion led by the leaders in those peer groups that geometrically magnifies the power and presence of the actual number and types of customer feedback received. They supply what can be a push forward and sometimes a push back to enterprises and their offerings. They also enable competing firms both overtly and covertly engage in influential positive and negative campaigns through their surrogates.

What Web 2.0 does is to immerse the firms participating or dragged into in public life. Everything about an outfit, their executives, and their offerings are fair game. Just like those who run for or are engaged in the business of elected office. As one who has run for public office, worked on many election campaigns, and who has covered such races, I can attest how challenging being able to promote and respond can be.

Web 2.0 requires, therefore, the same skills exercised by the political pros in devising and staying on message and deftly handling criticism and opponents. If you are to launch a Web 2.0 strategy you may want therefore to look for managers who have had successful election campaign experience and want to make some real money: public life does not pay handsomely. If there is anyone knows the game of people it is them.