The spring 2011 edition of the American Express OPEN “Small Business Monitor” found the use of social media for marketing was up over previous years. More than a third (35%) of US small businesses reported using online social networking for marketing, up from 15% in fall 2009. In addition, 12% of respondents were using blogs as a social tactic, nearly double the figure from fall 2009.

Usage of Facebook for customer acquisition was up 8 percentage points, while LinkedIn was up 6 points. Twitter usage also increased, holding third place. At the same time, usage of “other” social media was cut in half, suggesting that small businesses are not experimenting with sites out of the social media mainstream.

The small businesses surveyed expressed a need for social media expertise. Asked what new hire would most help their business, 9% said a social media expert, making it the second most popular choice after bookkeeper.

For more information at http://www.emarketer.com

According to research from Piper Jaffray, 20% of US teens’ spending went toward clothing as of spring 2011, with a further 8% spent on shoes and 11% on accessories and personal care items.

The leading influence on these purchases was friends a constant for teens. The internet came in second, above other types of media, such as TV or movies. There were demographic differences dividing girls and boys, however, when it came to influence. While friends were most important for all groups, boys said sports were No. 2, followed by the internet. Among girls, by contrast, the internet came third after magazines.

Boys and girls had somewhat different preferences among shopping channels. Among male teens, 15% chose online shopping as their favorite channel, compared to just 7% of female teens, who were more likely than males to prefer specialty, department and discount stores.

Among average-income teens, online shopping experienced only slight growth since fall 2010, although upper-income teens are taking to ecommerce in somewhat larger numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has reported slow gains in the number of teens buying online, which overall reached 48% of teen internet users in 2009.

Several factors hinder teens from buying online, including lack of access to payment methods like credit cards. But for most teen girls, online shopping is simply not social enough for them to give up their trips to the mall.

For more information at http://www.emarketer.com

In 2010, 38.5 percent of all new light-duty vehicles were registered to women – a 2.5-percent rise compared to 2006. Ethnic women (African American, Asian and Hispanic) have increased their vehicle purchase share by 4.7 percent during the same period.

Meanwhile, 47.9 percent of all MINIs are sold to women. The English brand is followed by Kia (46.8), Honda (46.0), Nissan (45.5) and Subaru (45.0).

Clearly, women represent a substantial market for automakers, which justifiably invest more and more time and financial resources to win them over. Nowadays, women are synonymous with profits.

So gentlemen, don't be offended if you go to a car dealership and the sales representative focuses on your significant other. It's just that they've finally realized her major role and influence in the shopping process and, ultimately, your purchase decision.

Apparently, the judges appreciated their insights into the investment prospects of AutoZone, Inc. Another interesting fact about this stellar group with its one female out of three participants is that it closely mirrors the gender makeup of finance majors at the university level and practicing financial advisers.

The shortage of females in the financial advising industry is surprising in that over one-half of prospective clients are female.

However, around the world in countries such as China and Japan women often play the role of family financial manager overseeing everything from the grocery list to investment of savings.

And, research has confirmed the benefits of applying a woman's intuition to the financial planning process. Niessen and Ruenzi in a 2007 study found women money managers running just over 10 percent of the 1,000 funds they examined. Those female money managers were found to be more risk averse and they followed more consistent investment style than male managers.

In defense of men, Nofsinger and Varma in a 2009 study found that 30 female financial advisers out of the 108 they studied had a tendency to take extra risks in the face of negative events — not unusual for risk averse people who experience greater pain at losses and who may take riskier positions to reverse the losses.

The female advisers showed more patience than men regarding their time preference of returns, which is very important for long term investment strategies.

All of this research shows that both men and women have their strengths and weaknesses. When looking for a financial adviser, in my opinion, the most important factors to consider are the qualifications of the adviser through education, certifications and experience regardless of gender. After that though, trust and comfort are also very important.

With that in mind, when seeking a financial adviser, gender may be important for some clients because they feel more comfortable sharing important information with their adviser whether it is a man or woman.

It is crucial that you be able to share confidential information with someone that you trust to listen to your needs, sympathize with your situation and give you sound advice.

First off, if you've been helping family during these tough times by providing them with a place to live, or maybe even paying their medical bills, you may be entitled to additional writeoffs. There's a $3,650 personal exemption deduction, favorable head of household filing status which gives unmarried individuals lower tax rates and a bigger standard deduction. There's also a medical expense writeoff if you itemize.

Did you conduct a job search? You can deduct some expenses associated with it like travel costs including half of all meals while out of town, resume prep costs as well as any headhunter or employment agency fees.

Maybe you went back to school. If that's the case, the most valuable tax breaks are employer-paid education arrangements, the American Opportunity Tax Credit (worth up to $2,500 for each eligible student) and the lifetime learning tax credit, which is worth up to $2,000 per household.

To be sure, the devil is in the details when it comes to saving money on taxes. Check with your tax professional to make sure you qualify for deductions. It doesn't hurt to do a little research on your own. Go to http://www. irs.gov for more details.

Thanks to tax guru bill bischoff at smartmoney.com for the ideas.

According to a June 2010 survey, people who use their mobile phone for web-based banking tend to be younger, male and more ethnically diverse than their online banking counterparts.

Mobile banking SMS users vary demographically from mobile web users. This group is slightly older than their mobile web banking counterparts, as 48 percent of these users are over the age of 35. With this simple easy-to-use feature, banks can provide customers the ability to track balances, set up alerts, and have much greater and immediate control of their finances.

According to David Gill, Senior Director of Mobile Marketing at The Nielsen Company, “People who are comfortable using their mobile phones for mobile banking tend to check their mobile bank site twice a week. These customers are already highly engaged and eager for real-time solutions based on their specific needs.”

Mobile banking offers something for every degree of technology adoption and comfort level, from sophisticated, mobile web-based banking services to the quick and simple, SMS texting based offerings that are driving mobile banking growth.

For more information at http://www.nielsen.com

Hardly a news organization exists that does not have a blog where its journalists post updates to breaking stories, offer personal commentary and engage in a dialogue with readers and viewers.

A couple of factors are likely to blame for the low levels of trust in social networks. First, the survey included all social networks and specifically singled out Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace and Flickr. These are very different services, each with its own set of baggage. It’s likely that a network with little privacy protection such as MySpace would have been perceived by respondents to be less trustworthy than others, and that would have dragged down the responses.

The other likely factor is bad publicity around Facebook’s privacy settings. Even though the survey was taken long before the film “The Social Network” cast a harsh light on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, privacy issues have dogged the company for years. The cumulative effect of negative media stories on this subject likely colored the survey responses.

This kind of attrition of trust was measurable in Gallup data on confidence in US institutions. The poll found that confidence in the presidency and Congress dropped dramatically from 2009 to 2010. The 6-point drop in the confidence level in Congress is particularly striking because it started from such a low base. In 2009, only 17% of respondents trusted Congress the lowest-ranked category in the survey. In 2010, the level dropped to 11%, also the lowest for that year.

This loss of faith is reflected in and perhaps partially caused by a barrage of negative publicity over the past 18 months.

A similar pattern afflicted the financial sector after the economic meltdown that began in 2008. Edelman’s “US Financial Services Trust Barometer 2010” found that the percentage of informed US consumers who trusted banks plummeted to 29% in 2010, from 68% in 2007. This drop was by far the most precipitous of any country, reflecting the central role that Wall Street played in what would become a global crisis.

Older respondents were considerably less trusting than those between ages 25 and 34. This is likely because Americans approaching retirement age were more directly affected by the financial crisis than the younger demographic.

US Informed Consumers Who Trust Financial Services Sources*, by Age, December 2009 (% of respondents)

The silver lining for banks and other institutions with low trust scores is that negative effects can be reversed. The Gallup poll cited above showed that confidence in banks actually gained a percentage point in mid-2010. Granted, the scores were in the low 20% range, so this isn’t exactly champagne-popping news. But the recovery suggests that after bad publicity blows over, people’s trust levels can bounce back.

For more on trust levels and word-of-mouth marketing, see the upcoming eMarketer report “Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Leveraging Trust Online and Offline.”

For more information at http://www.emarketer.com

Gaviria kicked off the discussion with these facts: The U.S. female Hispanic market is 23+ million and has a spending power of $479 billion.

To understand why, let's take a glimpse into the future. Imagine the year is 2020, and a major financial firm is collapsing.

The financial regulation bill that President Obama signed back in 2010 was meant to deal with just such a problem. It gave regulators something called "resolution authority." They could seize a dying firm, wipe out its shareholders, fire its top executives and keep it operating until its surviving parts could be sold off in an orderly fashion. Now, in 2020, the regulators are preparing to use that authority for the first time.

But as they dig into the details, they realize they are facing a raft of problems. One of the biggest is that the firm has 70 percent of its assets abroad (roughly the share of Citicorp's business that was overseas in 2009). Washington can't simply seize assets held in London, Shanghai or Moscow.

So ultimately, the regulators are left with the same choice that arose in 2008: bankruptcy or bailout. Regulators can let the firm fall apart suddenly and risk the kind of collateral damage that the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers caused. Or they can spend billions of taxpayer dollars propping up the firm, as was the case with A.I.G. It's a miserable choice.

You also can be pretty sure which of the two options tomorrow's policy makers will choose: bailout. History - in the form of the Great Depression and, more recently, Lehman - argues against the idea of liquidate, liquidate, liquidate, as Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, advocated. The downside, of course, is that taxpayers end up paying for Wall Street's sins.

Obama administration officials insist that the reregulation plan will prevent this outcome. They note that both the Senate and House bills will give regulators more authority to monitor financial firms. Banks will also be required to hold more cash in reserve, which will give them a bigger cushion when some investments do go bad. The rules for resolution authority, meanwhile, will be written with international cooperation in mind.

And maybe time will prove the administration correct. But a good number of economists and banking experts are worried. They think the odds of a future bankruptcy-or-bailout dilemma will remain uncomfortably high even if reregulation passes.

For starters, there are the cross-border problems; in the midst of a crisis, governments may have trouble cooperating. Then there is the fact that the regulators have never before tried to shut down anything as complex as a multibillion-dollar financial firm. "It's really hard - really hard," says Robert Steel, who worked on the financial crisis in the Bush Treasury Department and later was chief executive of Wachovia. "Anyone who says they know exactly what we should do is overconfident."

Another former top government official adds, bluntly, "Don't kid yourself into thinking that if J. P. Morgan were on the rocks, it would disappear."

Above all, no one knows what the next crisis will look like. So no one can be sure exactly how to prevent it. In all likelihood, Wall Street will eventually figure out ways around technocratic rules - and technocrats - and create trouble that today's proposals don't anticipate.

The beauty of a bank tax is that it acknowledges as much. Financial firms play a vital role in a market economy. But they also have a long record of causing crises, be it the South Sea bubble of 1720, the Panic of 1873, the Great Depression or our own Great Recession. A bank tax is akin to an insurance policy that taxpayers would require Wall Street to hold. The premiums on that policy would keep Wall Street from making big profits in good times while foisting its losses on society in bad.

The current Senate bill includes a kind of bank tax, but it has all kinds of problems. It would initially collect only $50 billion from firms and then set the money aside to pay the costs of future bailouts. Other crises have cost far more than $50 billion.

For this reason, the Obama administration prefers a postcrisis tax. The White House has proposed a so-called TARP tax, to raise at least $90 billion over the next decade and cover the costs of the 2008 bailout fund (the Troubled Asset Relief Program). But this idea has its own flaws. It does not leave any money for future busts. It assumes Washington will always be able to recoup those costs later, which doesn't sound like a great bet.

The I.M.F. prefers a permanent tax, for the good reason that the risk of crises is permanent. "The challenge is to ensure that financial institutions bear the direct financial costs that any future failures or crises will impose - and maybe somewhat more, given all the other costs that bank failure can impose on the economy," Carlo Cottarelli, the head of the I.M.F.'s fiscal affairs unit, wrote last weekend. The tax wouldn't go into a dedicated bailout fund. Its purpose instead would be to discourage too much risk-taking and, over the long term, help offset any bailout costs.

Close connections with community banks give the Fed a better understanding of the nation's financial risks, including problems in commercial real-estate and small-business lending, according to Bernanke's prepared remarks.

A Senate bill to overhaul financial regulation would strip the Fed of its power to supervise state-chartered banks and bank holding companies with assets of less than $50 billion. That would leave the Fed overseeing only 35 big bank holding companies. The legislation, written by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., is set to be debated on Monday by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, which he leads.

Critics have blamed lax regulation at the Fed and at other agencies for contributing to the financial crisis.

Financial instability can undermine small banks, not just big ones, Bernanke said. Small banks contributed to the problems of the Great Depression, he noted.

Small banks have expressed support for continued regulation by the Fed and have made arguments similar to Bernanke's.

Dodd's proposal would mean major changes to Fed's system of 12 regional banks. For example, Fed banks in Kansas City, Mo., and St. Louis no longer would have any banks under their supervision.

Bernanke defended the Fed's structure of regional banks and a board based in Washington. He said it has provided policymakers "with a way to keep in close touch with the continent-spanning, highly varied economy of the United States."

Dodd, however, is pushing back at Bernanke's argument, noting that former Fed officials and others who have testified before his committee have made the opposite point -- that bank supervision and monetary policy are not related.

Dodd's staff pointed to testimony from a former Fed vice chairman, Alice Rivlin, and a former Fed director of monetary affairs, Vincent Reinhart. "I didn't really experience that we learned a lot from the supervising particular banking institutions that was useful to monetary policy," Rivlin told the committee last July.

The Obama administration has supported a broader supervisory role for the Fed. Legislation passed by the House to overhaul the regulatory system wouldn't trim the Fed's banking duties. President Barack Obama, who used his Saturday radio and Internet address to back a financial overhaul, cited large banks that "engaged in reckless financial speculation without regard for the consequences -- and without tough oversight."

Obama never mentioned the Fed by name in his remarks while praising Dodd for offering "a strong foundation for reform."

John Bowman, acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, on Saturday said that Congress should replace the current four banking regulators with two -- one overseeing community banks and savings and loans, and the other in charge of big, complex commercial banks. Bowman made his remarks in a speech to the banking group gathering in Orlando.

As Congress moves forward on regulatory changes, Bernanke urged lawmakers to adopt a mechanism to safely unwind big financial companies whose failure could endanger the entire U.S. economy. The Fed chief renewed his support for a process similar to the one the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. uses to dismantle failing banks.

"The unavoidable challenge is to make sure that size, complexity and interconnectedness do not insulate such firms from market discipline, potentially making them ticking time bombs inside our financial system," he said.

Bernanke urged Congress to waste no time in overhauling financial rules.

"It is unconscionable that the fate of the world economy should be so closely tied to the fortunes of a relatively small number of giant financial firms," he said. "If we achieve nothing else in the wake of the crisis, we must ensure that we never again face such a situation."

In a brief question-and-answer session after his speech, Bernanke discussed the delicate balancing act the Fed faces in strengthening bank regulations while at the same time not hurting banks' ability to make loans to creditworthy customers.

"The most difficult task we face is to achieve appropriate balance between prudence, which is important, and making good loans," Bernanke said.

Federal Reserve: www.federalreserve.gov

Transfer your balance from high rate card to low rate credit card, which means, if you have credit cards with APR 10%, 18% and 30%, transfer the balance from the 30% APR to one with 10%. This significantly reduces the debt you owe.

You can avail the debt consolidation loan to pay off the card debt. However it is extremely important to abstain from any unnecessary expenditure. No remedy would fix your credit card debt unless you plan a budget for yourself and prioritize your needs. Cut down expenses wherever possible and try to pay off the debt first, any delay would keep increasing your credit card debt.

At times the creditors might not be convinced enough with your reasons and commitment to pay and then you might need the help of a professional. If your credit card debt is over $10000 it is worth referring an expert. Debt settlement companies have professionals who are adept at debt handling. Their knowledge and expertise in debt can be utilized to eliminate the debt up to 50-70 percent. This helps you pay off the debt in 2-3 years flat instead of stretching it for 30 years or so.

Finding legitimate debt settlement companies is not that difficult but consumers must know where to look. It would be wise to utilize a debt relief network that will qualify the companies for you and ensure that they are legitimate and have proven themselves

Some of the areas of negotiation would be to lower the interest rate on the credit card, waive off the late fees, over due payment and other financial charges. They stretch out the period of payment to 2-3 years and recommend paying at least 3% of the debt every month consistently. Debt consolidation can also be a part of the program. You can merge debt from multiple credit cards into single payment or transfer the high interest rate debt into lower interest rate.

There is also an option to take debt consolidation loan to start off paying the credit card debt. All this put together would help reduce the debt by 50-70 percent; this leaves you with the remaining 30-40 percent to be paid over a time period of 2-3 years. This scheme might be accompanied with a bad credit score, but it never the less has milder impact that filing bankruptcy. Bankruptcy spoils your credit history for at least 10 years, denying you of further loan or debt from government or private financial organizations. Keep all avenues opened to settle debt, do not resort to bankruptcy.

Finding legitimate debt settlement companies is not that difficult but consumers must know where to look. It would be wise to utilize a debt relief network that will qualify the companies for you and ensure that they are legitimate and have proven themselves.