Google’s new social search tool went live yesterday, enabling participants to see results from agreed social networks they belong to. The timing is interesting, shortly after Google had agreed a deal with Twitter to incorporate tweets in search, here’s a tool to mine them.

Also yesterday, eMarketer’s latest survey once again confirmed word of mouth is the number one purchase driver online, family first, friends second, social networks third.

So theoretically, if we’re looking for a hotel recommendation in say, Dijon and some friends have stayed there and tweeted about it “Having dinner in the garden at the lovely Sofitel, Dijon” - that’s the review we trust, more so than the one from Swedish  Bjorn and Benny on Trip Advisor who enjoyed playing the hotel piano (though that might have been quite a sing along).

Powerful stuff and quite scary too. If the authors of many of the tweets I see day to day start seeing them turn up in search results, I suspect they’ll be dramatically more circumspect in what they’re writing. Every tweet and every blog online is a now a contributor to your personal and professional reputation.

Watching the Warren Buffett interview last night with Evan Davis, it stuck me how old fashioned and yet modern his business was. Here’s a man who has never switched on a computer, let alone been on a social network, yet he built his business through local networks and word of mouth marketing whilst fiercely guarding his reputation.

One of Buffett’s more famous quotes is “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it” For 2009, that could be updated to “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 140 characters to ruin it”

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