Friendly’s Ice Cream selected Regan Communications Group Inc. as its public relations agency of record. The Boston-based restaurant chain emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January after closing 100 shops and laying off thousands of workers.

Sun Capital Partners, a Florida-based private-equity firm co-run by Marc Leder (who hosted the fund-raiser where Mitt Romney made his infamous “47 percent” comment) took the 76-year-old ice cream chain into bankruptcy in October 2011, shed its pensions and downsized and then repurchased the chain through an affiliate.

ShopPR has been chosen as AOR for Keds, the American lifestyle brand established in 1916. ShopPR will be responsible for social/digital marketing and public relations; for its first assignment this October, the agency helped Keds introduce its multi-year partnership with six-time Grammy winning singer-songwriter and style icon Taylor Swift.

“We’re so thrilled and proud to be working with Keds”, said Vanessa Pesce, Managing Director of ShopPR. “We’re inspired by the way Keds is encouraging girls to reach their full potential, and we also look forward to promoting the brand’s iconic styles.”

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For all the talk of original content and social interactions defining a brand in the current age, you’d think that the fingerprints of various marketing chiefs would be all over the social media sphere.

And yet, according to a study performed by conference company BusinessNext Social, the very opposite is true: only 20% of CMOs at Fortune 500 companies have a discernible social media presence.

We understand that most C-level execs, who tend to move from brand to brand throughout their careers, would rather avoid the PR risks of social media by letting other members of their teams take responsibility for spreading the brand message. But the study confirms that most remain stubbornly resistant to Twitter; isn’t that something of an old-school perspective?

The market may force them to jump online: The CMO Survey predicts that social media spending as a share of marketing budgets will nearly triple over the coming five years, and “Gartner Research predicts the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017.”

What’s the social media model for the successful CMO? This handy infographic lists Beth Comstock of General Electric as the most influential marketing officer on the social circuit, and a quick glance at her account reveals why:

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We recently posted a story discussing whether fake “user” reviews posted to social media and retail sites on behalf of clients could be considered acceptable PR tools. The overwhelming response we received from PR professionals strongly hinted at a critical consensus: While the practice is somewhat common, it is never OK.

Gerard F. Corbett, Chairman and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America, even weighed in to state unequivocally that posting reviews under fake names is unethical and should not be tolerated by any respectable PR organization.

Unfortunately, researchers behind a newly released Gartner study believe that the practice will only continue to grow despite our ethical quandaries. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg scenario: As consumers conduct more of their research and shopping online, positive social media reviews will become more and more important to brands—and in the rush to establish and expand a product’s online reputation, quite a few individuals will end up breaking the rules. (Researchers place the percentage of fake reviews at 10-15% by 2014.)

According to Gartner, someone will pay for cheating—and soon.

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