“The entropy that is Occupy Wall Street threatens to either destroy the group or propel it to new heights,” says Michael Robinson, senior vice president for Levick Strategic Communications, an international public relations firm. “They need to be really careful about becoming too schizophrenic and having too many personalities. They risk getting diffused if they expand themselves too much.”…

“In the ’60s, you had the civil rights movement and Vietnam with specific goals, but once those goals were met, the activists had nowhere to go,” he says. “We are building this for the long term.”

If that’s true, all the more danger and promise at the moment, say others. The more you tighten goals with specifics, the more people get alienated.

“I think this is going to get dragged down by all these splinter groups,” says David Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision LLC, a public affairs polling and branding consulting firm. “Their great appeal at the beginning was that they had people from left, right, and middle involved. But now we have the president mentioning them at a major press conference, and others like [former Wisconsin Democratic senator] Russ Feingold, and the movement is beginning to look like a liberal response to the tea party, rather than a genuine apolitical move.”