Brooke’s Note: If you’re like me and have doubts about social media, this is the kind of article that may make you think twice. I sent two tweets (beyond our auto-tweets of new articles) this week and intend to send more. No snickering, Pat Allen. See: Why RIAs would rather go to Twitter than talk to a wholesaler.

H. Jude Boudreaux spends just 30 minutes a day on social media sites but in the last two years, he’s gotten eight new clients who found out about him from social websites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

That’s a big deal for a small firm. Boudreaux started Upperline Financial Planning LLC in New Orleans in 2010 and that brings his total of clients to 40.

Boudreaux, 35, doesn’t want to spend money on marketing and has found his niche interacting with people on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. See: What three highly wired financial advisors have to teach us about social media.

Brooke’s Note: Sallie Krawcheck is still playing hard to get in the world of financial advice where she belongs in spirit — the progressive and accountable RIA business. But while we continue to chide her on that point, we also like more and more what she’s doing, who she’s hanging out with and what she’s hinting at. I’m also seeing more and more courage. See: Sallie Krawcheck, A Recruiter’s Nightmare. Who else could get away with some quality scolding of the Republican Party in front of what was no doubt an Envestnet conference crowd peopled by plenty of elephants?

You had to listen carefully — like the hopeful revolutionary listening to a speech given by a Chinese dissident — and to be an afficionado of comments related to the emergence of new ways of providing financial advice.

Even then you would not come away certain of whether Sallie Krawcheck is the Switzerland of financial advice dignitaries or a chameleon whose comments never get past camouflage.

Krawcheck, who has headed the global wealth management units of both Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. spoke before 1,000 ...

Brooke’s Note: Fairly or not, Meredith Whitney will go down in history for predicting Dante’s deepest inferno for municipal bonds and being wrong. But that didn’t stop her from taking a three-pronged approach to improving her position in history from the podium of IMCA’s national conference in Seattle. First, she offered some fresh thoughts, then she, for the most part, denied the doomster comments and then, I believe, she defended the doomster comments. Karl Thunemann faithfully recorded the meat of all that she said, and so you can be the judge.

Meredith Whitney has a vision of profound economic change sweeping the United States.

The market analyst calls it a bifurcation. The “coasts,” awash in a tide of debt, unemployment, rising taxes, falling services, and shards of the exploded housing bubble, will see the wealthy depart their shores for better opportunities inland.

Meanwhile, the central core, awash in the incredible flood of new, cheap energy, will enjoy rising consumer spending, lower debt, lower unemployment and the influx of wealthy people seeking sanctuary from the coasts.

Brooke’s Note: We didn’t plan this but it’s a perfect followup to yesterday’s article that mentions the exact scenario of male advisor not looking at female client…what they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School, perhaps because the presume you have that much common sense. See: How a suddenly wealthy, young Bay Area widow found her RIA after months of fruitless efforts.

The young couple, determined to start planning their financial future, spent 45 minutes interviewing a financial advisor referred by a friend. As the couple walked away, the wife looked at her husband and said, “He never once looked at me.”

Years later, Sallie Krawcheck stood on the podium in front of hundreds of Smith Barney financial advisors and completed her personal story — she was the young wife in the story — by sharing the words, “BIG MISTAKE.” See: Sallie Krawcheck talks tough — and with disarming openness — online about the glass ceiling and lip gloss.

Sallie’s situation continues to be a challenge for many women today.

Brooke’s Note: When I was talking to Jane for this article there came a point when she asked that I stop for a second and put myself in her shoes. Here’s a young woman suddenly in charge of millions of dollars for the first time in her life when she has, in essence, never been responsible for any wealth to speak of whatsoever. Not only that but she spent decades getting a high-level degree in a fairly arcane subject that left her with no translatable skills to the job market. Nor is she inclined to work much soon, because she has young children. In other words, this money she possesses may have to last her the rest of her life. She doesn’t feel qualified to manage the money but she is also just as uncertain about whom to trust or how to find a trusted advisor. See: What is the value proposition of a financial advisor — and how is a budding RIA culture upping the ante?. The one thing she trusts are her honed research skills and tenacity. Here is the tale of how all of this ...

Brooke’s Note: It happened to The Wall Street Journal and apparently now to the Financial Times. Both publications have lurched away from serving the businessman and toward the wealthy consumer. You can tell by the advertising and the articles. But the businessperson needs business coverage — now more than ever — and that has allowed publications like ours to elbow into niches and make a go of it. But with print business publications teetering, FT and WSJ are having to find ways to reclaim some of those business-to-business readers. See: Wall Street Journal explains RIAs in article. And so advisors continue to see new publications aimed at them spring up online. All those resources make us a little nervous, but it’s compensated for by the fact that our instincts about this business are being affirmed by people who aren’t exactly starting on a shoestring budget.

Financial Times-owned Money-Media has launched a free online publication aimed at independent financial advisors. Managing editor Joan Warner says that FA IQ, which made its debut April 11, will fill a different niche than Money-Media’s other investment-oriented publications, Ignites and FundFire, with very ...

I was supposed to be done running almost an hour-and-a-half before the explosions went off at the Boston Marathon finish line. I should have been long gone and seen the violent attacks on TV with the rest of the nation. Instead, I was just blocks away when the blasts shot through the crowds on Boylston Street — not that anyone knew that’s what had happened.

For the last six months, I’ve been training for the Boston Marathon, putting in hundreds of hours and miles with the goal of running the 26.2-mile course in 3:07. But, four weeks ago a bone spur in my foot stopped me from running. I fretted and worried and angsted the way people do about goals that will go unachieved and work that will go wasted. Still, I headed out to Boston, because what is there to do except what you can?

There is an attitude that pervades the crowds of athletes before a race. We are all in this together. And, nowhere is this probably more evident than at the most famous race in the world: the Boston Marathon. I caught a ...

Brooke’s Note: Chip Roame has plenty of thoughts and theories that people can disagree with. What’s nice is that he has long seen that intellectual friction as being precisely the point of assembling the advisory executives with the big titles and the outlandish frequent flyer totals. Now if only the executives in attendance would rise to the bait to do their brainstorming parts. Dina does a great job of storming into Chip’s kitchen to capture the sizzle en route (literally) to Washington DC to do book store readings of her new book, Little Red.

It was the last morning session, and the attending CEOs at the 24th edition of the Tiburon CEO Summit — whose combined time is conservatively worth $200,000 an hour — were now several minutes behind schedule.

So as conference producer Charles “Chip” Roame took the stage, he had two objectives for his truncated 90-minute slot. One of them was to avail his overqualified audience of his entire distilled knowledge of the financial industry. The other objective was to get things on schedule. See: Eavesdropping on the Tiburon CEO Summit: A cross-advisory channel power crowd ...

Brooke’s Note: It’s always an eyebrow raiser when a roll-up experiences some unrolling. It happens. Focus Financial and United Capital have also lost advisors at times and they are booming along. At companies like Boston Private it was more of a sign of challenge. One thing about roll-ups of companies: They are really roll-ups of people. And not all people can foresee whether they’ll get along in the long run when they sign papers in the short run.

Margaret Towle has left HighTower Advisors a few months shy of her two-year anniversary.

The one-woman RIA team Margaret Towle came to the Chicago-based aggregator from Greycourt & Co. Inc.'s Minneapolis office to found and set up two HighTower offices: one in Minneapolis and the other in Seattle, where she maintains a second home.

At the time Towle said she was bringing along fewer than 10 clients with a combined $1 billion of assets under management. The clients were all endowments, foundations and ultra-high-net worth individuals. See: HighTower stages its first raid of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney’s elite consulting unit.

Brooke’s Note: What gives? Firms that make their living by doing investment banking-type work for RIAs are building up their forces like an army when an enemy is bearing down on its borders: suddenly and rapidly. But there is no new external force. Purchases and sales of RIAs have still not taken off. But there’s work, plenty of it, for these firms and that shows something about what services RIAs are now looking to pay for.

Mergers-and-acquisitions firms for RIAs are hiring like there’s no tomorrow — and without the tailwind of a breakout bull market for financial advisory practice sales. See: Even as mired markets stalled Q2 merger deals, private-equity-fueled national acquirers revved up prices.

Arguably at the top of the heap of these players is Silver Lane Advisors LLC, which mostly does deals in the $1-billion to $10-billion AUM range. Recent transactions include the acquisition of Luminous Capital Holdings LLC on behalf of First Republic Bank; the acquisition of Mt. Eden Investment Advisors LLC for Evercore Wealth Management LLC; the sale of Interactive Advisory Software to Hanlon Financial Group; the sale of Fortigent LLC to LPL ...