A Lite Analysis Of Mutual Fund Firms 'Getting Hip' To Social Media

When you may have been making the guacamole dip for the Super Bowl game Sunday, MarketWatch released this video perspective on mutual fund adoption of social media, Twitter and Facebook primarily. (And here's a related article.)

After describing and showing MFS, Vanguard, Putnam and US Funds' Twitter and Facebook pages, WSJ Reporter Emily Glazer equivocates when asked whether investors are benefiting. "It's definitely an engagement interactive kind of thing...[Fund companies] are trying to put forward who they are: 'We have a little personality, we don't know if you knew that before but we do.'"

Let's hope—and I believe it to be true—that the objectives and the benefits of the industry's work on social media initiatives are more than what's apparent to MarketWatch.