Our very own Maria Rinklin, M Booth’s Digital Media Strategist and Queen of the Digisquad, was featured in Mom Central’s newsletter today! Maria shares some of her social media knowledge and talks about the work M Booth has recently been doing in the digital sphere. And, of course, mentions her killer matchmaking skills!

—Alyssa

It’s an exciting day here at M Booth! We are extremely excited to join the Next Fifteen family. And don’t worry, we’ll still be the same M Booth you know and love.

—Alyssa

BusinessWeek currently has a slideshow of 50 CEOs on Twitter. But they forgot M Booth’s CEO, @margibpr! I’m still working on converting her into a Twitter fan.

—Alyssa

Time for a little M Booth news — The Holmes Report named us the Creative Agency of the Year! The newsletter (free registration required) writes:

M Booth & Associates, which has ranked among New York’s top independent PR firms consistently over the past two decades, has built its success on the ability to do many things well—it has practices devoted to the consumer, travel and leisure, healthcare, corporate and not-for-profit sectors—but the key to its success across the board is the firm’s creativity. Because of its ability to deliver create brand insights and the strategic programming to take advantage of those insights, it has demonstrated its ability to compete successfully with the best of the niche firms and the biggest of the full-service multinationals, as demonstrated by the continued expansion of client relationships with Unilever, American Express and others, and the addition over the past 12 months of new clients including Tropicana, eBay’s kijiji service, the Danish tourism board, and three liquor brands from Proximo. The firm also created a “Better For You” practice to focus on the consumer health sector and launched First Word Digital, a new group that includes a suite of digital and social media tools and continuing to do smart work for clients such as Ronzoni (giving cows the day off for the Smart Taste line) and Vaseline (the “Skin is Amazing” campaign) to the U.S. Virgin Islands (capitalizing on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot on the islands).

Congrats to all!

—Alyssa

Here’s an excellent article on a very important trend I keep telling my friends and colleagues they should pay heed to: Personal Branding.  Courtesy of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (M Booth’s oldest client).

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Jim MacMillan is profiled as a succesful example of someone who re-invented himself though social networking.

While still employed as a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Daily News, he had launched his own web site — jimmacmillan.net — for posting his photos and linking to related stories in the news. Like many professionals, he also created a profile on Facebook, Twitter and every social network he could learn about, roughly 40 in all. Eventually, he took a severance package from the newspaper and threw everything into social networking. Today, he has close to 14,000 followers reading his posts on Twitter — a number on a par with some celebrities — and keeps in touch with about 475 friends on Facebook. He believes he reaches a larger and more engaged audience than when he was at the Daily News.

Jim is part of a growing mass of professionals — including musicians, writers, artists and even business experts — who are engaging large audiences by making songs available on a MySpace page, sharing their expertise on Twitter or building a national readership by blogging.

With today’s tough job market and struggling economy, people need to differentiate themselves and start to employ the same kind of branding techniques used by many of today’s top businesses.

- Danny

He’s too modest to mention it himself, so I will…our very own Danny was featured on Small Business Trends’s Ultimate Small Business Twitter List! Danny was listed under his client, American Express OPEN. If you want to discuss any aspect of entrepreneurship or small business, Danny’s your man(ny)!

—Alyssa