If you Twitter search WOM and Social Media together, you find a plethora of bad information, with the occasional buried nugget. So why is there so much confusion around what WOM is and what social media is? Because the two are often synonymous, they are however fundamentally different.
WOM is the viral spread of communication, whether it be online or off, when a person tells someone else about something its word-of-mouth. Social Media is a reference to the new set of tools that communicators (everyone) are using to transfer information, the poster child of which is the social network.
When we learned that info spreads like butter in a social network, we deemed it the social media, many-to-may revolution. The many-to-many concept is really good ol' fashioned word-of-mouth. The tools of social media just act to excite the process because it is so easy and fun to transfer information in social networks. That's why social media is such an attractive lil ditty to the WOM marketer. It is only one peice of the puzzle for the WOM marketer however. Studies show that offline recommendations and WOM generate more leads for business then online WOM. If done right though online WOM generates offline WOM. This is the WOM marketers holy grail and why it social media is so so attractive. But not unlike chasing that dream girl it is hard to accomplish this feat.
Hope this subtracts from the WOM vs Social Media ideas, what do you think?
Thanks dragonhawk for the picture :)