Social media tips for your company from a 140-year-old museum. Really.

In PR, case studies are like gold. People love reading about companies or people that did something cool or interesting that they can borrow and do for themselves.

This is the story of an unexpected case study: a 140-year-old museum focused on fishing and art in a coastal Massachusetts town. It’s not a huge, well-funded museum like the Met in New York or the MFA in Boston. It’s the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Mass.

Founded in 1873 as the Cape Ann Scientific and Literary Association (catchy name, right?), the Cape Ann Museum has lots of works about the history of Gloucester, the nation’s oldest fishing port, but also an art collection by the surprisingly large number of artists who’ve lived on or been inspired by Cape Ann.

No More Space for MySpace: How PR Could Have Saved the Day

“The new MySpace is the social and music discovery destination powered by the passion of fans. Music, videos, photos, and TV, made social.”

Such is the self-described mission of the “new” MySpace, as featured on its revamped website. Some may scratch their heads, unaware that the former social media giant still exists, while others recoil in fear that a profile of their younger self lies stagnant in the shadows of the Internet stratosphere, threatening to resurrect and ruin their young professional careers.

You may have an inkling as to which reaction I had.

Once I accepted the prospect of encountering my self-portrait-snapping, fAnCiiE-tYpiiNg former online life, I took a second look at this description and was struck by a few things.

Digg of the Dead – The website’s triumphant return to the world social news sharing

Digg has done what most social media platforms are unable to accomplish, much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of MySpace’s would-be knight in shining armor Justin Timberlake – Digg has returned from the dead.

Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle reported that “Digg had once attracted a (rumored) multi-hundred million dollar bid from the likes of Google,” and ended up selling for a measly $500,000 to Betaworks in July, after the site, in Biddle’s words, just went to hell.

In the PR world, we mourned the loss of the social news website, which allowed us to share client content and news, with the potential of driving thousands of unique visits to their websites and blogs. Sure, Digg promised us a full recovery, but you’ll have to forgive us for not believing that, in six weeks, there would be follow-through. Just look at MySpace and Friendster.

Social Media Etiquette from the Ghost of Emily Post

According to a recent report from DOMO, 70 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies have no social media presence.

I find myself asking how can this possibly be a real statistic? In her piece for Forbes, Victoria Barret writes that social media isn’t a passing fad—one of the major reasons to utilize social media is because that’s where your customers are.

Barret is right. Social media has been changing the game for businesses on a global level for several years, allowing them to share their products, brand and point of view everywhere from Canada to Australia. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google + allow businesses the opportunity to not only sell a product, but to have real personality and engage with the audience that matters most to their business—their customers, clients, potential new hires and even existing employees.

Do You Need a PR Agency that Does Social Media?

Few communications professionals are really questioning if social media is here to stay. We can all debate how it may evolve, but its existence is no longer a question. Yet many—particularly in the B2B space—are not sure if social media needs to play a role in their PR program. I certainly understand the question. After all, even as someone who runs a PR and social content firm, I can’t justify a huge investment in social content for some clients whose target prospects just plain aren’t using channels like Twitter, Google+, etc. in a significant way. However, regardless of whether you need social media for yourself, your PR firm unequivocally should be using social media to do its job.

Content Curation is NOT Content Creation

Content curation is the term du jour in social media circles these days. While different definitions are bandied about, we define it quite simply here as the monitoring of your Twitter account/ RSS feeds/Delicious bookmarks—or wherever and however you monitor the topics you care about—and then sharing that data through your own social media channels. Done right, content curation can help you serve as a valuable resource to your audiences and even make you look pretty smart on occasion. It also delivers potent SEO juice. But here’s the thing: content curation is NOT content creation. And most importantly, content curation alone is not a winning marketing strategy.

The Fancy: the high-end commerce answer to Pinterest

It was only a matter of time before websites similar to the increasingly popular Pinterest started to pop up out of the woodwork. The Fancy describes itself as “part store, blog, magazine and wishlist,” and it’s the store piece that’s really differentiating the platform from its competitor. The site allows you to “Fancy” anything you see on the Web so you can return to it at a later time.

According to a recent article in Fast Company, the New York-based startup has 250,000 users compared to Pinterests’ more than 10 million users, but has some serious clout behind it. Fancy’s board includes Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. They’ve collected $18 million from investors, which include Andreessen Horowitz, Ashton Kutcher and French conglomerate PPR, the parent company of high-end fashion lines like Gucci and Alexander McQueen.