The elephant in the Twitterverse

What keeps large corporations out of the social media space? Because the elephant in the room is -

• C-Suite still doesn't believe there's any money to be made
• If something goes viral, you lose control
• And if it goes viral because you offend hundreds of thousands of people in the Twitterverse, heads will roll.

Well guess what - Canada's Financial Post is reporting that ING, the unmortgage financial powerhouse of the 1990s, has just had every corporations' worse nightmare occur.

Quoting "In early January 2013, ING Direct Canada put into market a new TV commercial to promote its RSP and TFSA products in advance of RSP season. The commercial depicted a clearly stressed out man who viewers soon discover was helped by his wife taking him to ING. It didn’t take long for consumers — who interpreted the ad as making light of symptoms often associated with mental illness — to voice their indignation through social media channels, including direct communication with ING Canada CEO Peter Aceto. The backlash forced the bank to decide whether to do away with the ads during a critical promotional period or sacrifice some of the brand equity it had earned among consumers by keeping the ads on air. "

Read the full story here: How ING Canada prevented a social media 'issue' from becoming a full-blown PR crisis

Not entirely incidentally, ING has just been M&A'd and is now a teeny pimple at Canada's financial powerhouse Scotiabank. Guess they're gonna need a bigger ad agency!

Full disclosure- I am an ING bank customer and that is my promocode ad on the far right Nav. Sign up and get a $25.00 dollars bonus. And so will I.

Why do Canadians put so much of their retirement savings in mutual funds?

David Pett has just written a great article in the Financial Post questioning the value of holding mutual funds in your RRSP. I find Mr Pett totally on-point, largely because his comments  exactly correlate to my own blog post of Oct 2012 listing the  Top Ten reasons not to have Canadian Mutual Funds in your RRSP

Largely the issues remain:

• High management fees (MER)
• Poor management performance
• Weak stock market (since 2008)
• Lack of investment alternatives (poor bond and GIC performance)

Canadians deserve better. After taking a 700 hundred billion dollar haircut in 2008, their ever-nearing retirement lifestyles are in jeopardy due to a lethargic mutual fund management industry.

From the Financial Post:  Mutual funds still popular with Canadians, but why?

Top Ten reasons not to have Canadian Mutual Funds in your RRSP

1. Fox's Paradox:
   
   • I want my fund manager to make enormous profits trading in the stock markets
   • Any fund manager that actually can make enormous profits trading in the stock markets would spend her days making herself rich
   • Therefore no fund manager who can make enormous profits would work at a mutual fund
2. There are no Index Funds that can match the Index
3. The funds do not hold what they say they do. My Global Commodities market is invested 40.7% in Canadian Stocks and 39.1% in US Stocks. That's 79.8% in North American stocks. That's not Global
4. On Jan 3rd of every year your fund loses 4.5% of its value – the cumulative drag of the MER (Management Expense Ratio) and the previous 12 months of inflation
5. Holding US funds in your Canadian investment account incurs currency exchange fees:
   • When you buy the funds
   • When the fund pays dividends
   • When you sell the funds
   • You even pay exchange fees when you receive your annual distribution
6. Holding a mutual fund in an RSP means that you cannot claim a loss on your taxes
7. The highest performing mutual funds charge "loads". A front-end load is a fee to buy the fund; a back-end load is the fee to sell a fund
8. The CDIC (Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation) does not cover mutual funds
9. By definition mutual fund managers churn their holdings – they buy and sell every day, typically turning over 90% of the fund portfolio in a year. If a stock isn't worth buying and holding for 5 years, it's not worth buying and holding for three months'
10. I'll leave the last words to Rob Carrick of Report on Business "Plenty of mutual funds are run by faceless nobodies who come and go with all the impact of a tree falling in a forest."
    
    ROB, Mar 17 2009

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. This is the story of how I pick my stocks. I cannot recommend these stocks for you. My invitation is that you use this story as an inspiration to develop your own portfolio that meets your risk profile, the type of stocks you can understand, and that are recommended by professional writers and market analysts. I am an amateur investor. I enjoy the hobby, and invite you to enjoy it too.