Will Facebook’s “Social Apps” help spur or or sideline WOM online?

When it comes to WOM, social media holds exciting opportunities for marketers, and this week’s announcements from Facebook show how their taking advantage of the technology whether we like it or not, literally.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook unveiled some dramatic new changes that will make sharing online a “frictionless” experience. Basically, through “social apps” for things like watching movies, listening to music, and reading articles, users share what they’re doing with friends without intentionally choosing to “Like” it. Facebook users will get the opportunity to see almost everything their friends are doing. Meanwhile, Facebook and the organizations involved will keep all this information and learn more about what products we choose and how we are influenced by our social networks.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for WOM via online social media. In this week’s readings, we learned more about how to use social networks to increase WOM. In “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited,” for example, Rosen told us that one of the best ways to create buzz was to understand how it spreads through common nodes and how the net can strengthen weak ties. Berger & Schwartz, meanwhile, discussed how WOM will thrive if it is accessible and visible to the public, whether the content or product is interesting or not.

In this regard, Facebook seems to have improved the platform for spurring WOM for marketers. More and more of the things our close friends and even weak-tie acquaintances do will now be visible and accessible to us online. We will also have more opportunities to comment on our activities as more organizations create apps integrated into Facebook.

However, the quality of the WOM that such sharing starts is sure to be debated. Not everyone is thrilled about the new changes. As Farhad Manjoo of Slate writes, “sharing is fundamentally about choosing.” If we are forced to share everything, it could potentially lead to information overload, anger over privacy, or even declines in active participation -- none of which would be good for WOM.

Of course, as Keller & Berry from Advertising Age showed, 90% of WOM conversations occur face-to-face or by phone and only 7% online. This is a pretty amazing statistic, but could become less relevant as Facebook becomes more integrated into our day-to-day lives. As the young Facebook founder famously says in what has now come to be known as “Zuckerberg’s Law,” the amount of stuff people share on the site roughly doubles every year -- and right now its at about 4 billion things a day. With the new changes to Facebook, that number is sure to grow. What is unknown is how much good WOM it will create.