Passive lurkers make up 80 percent at the bottom of any online community food chain. But at the very top are the few, truly talented online talk radio hosts who set the tone for the community and keep the masses coming back for more. Unfortunately, as thousands of business Web sites proliferate their own online communities, there just isn't enough of this talent to go around. To achieve viability, new communities often must steal mindshare from established communities with a similar subject focus. Like beer can empties after a Merle Haggard concert, thousands of abandoned splinter groups litter Usenet as a testament to the difficulty of creating new topics.
Some groups define themselves narrowly enough to survive the challenge of established groups.
Yet they frequently lack the critical mass needed to sustain themselves after the subject matter is quickly exhausted. Furthermore, to the rude awakening of many wide-eyed online businesses, few visitors will gravitate to your site's message boards to simply discuss your products as its central theme. If you're lucky enough to have a product like Spam or Mentos, you can pass such unabashed self-promotion as an online community. The rest of us must at least pretend to show interest in less commercial pursuits before the masses fawn over our tubes of denture cream. Perhaps there's something we can learn from the successes of high-profile community sites like GeoCities.