Valley PR Blog

Malcolm Atherton Joins Thomson Reuters

By Linda VandeVrede on June 22nd, 2010 In People, Social Media

When I first met Malcolm Atherton in his role at Businesswire, I was impressed because he seemed to be one of those rare sales types who sincerely takes an interest in his clients’ needs. I owe a lot of my introduction to social media in the early days (2006) to Malcolm.

He has now moved on to embrace a new opportunity with Thomson Reuters as “public relations sales specialist.”   This past January, Thomson ONE Public Relations was launched. It’s a web-based platform that combines a lot of the previously segmented services and tools that PR professionals use. This includes social media analysis for campaigns, brands and products; print, broadcast and online social media monitoring; and identification of the top influencers.

One of the advantages is that it is subscription-based so no more paying per clip or having to worry about word counts or add-on multimedia costs for press releases. As I understand it, it puts the PR person in the driver’s seat to self publish.  You log into the platform, and from there, you have access to the activities that you subscribe to, whether it’s press release self-publishing, media monitoring, or social media targeting and analytics.

Malcolm will be still based here in Arizona and work from home in Fountain Hills.   “My house and I have become Thomson Reuters.   Our local staff consists of a Dachshund, a Lab and me.”

This career path was appealing to him, he says, “because I felt like the models other PR service providers offer are outdated and too segmented. Today’s technologies and tools allow us to do so much more than anyone has ever been able to do before. The Web, sophisticated algorithms, and cloud-based tools support the self-publishing of content; the measurement, analysis, and capture of data, mentions, and sentiment; and much much more.”

You can read more about the new platform here. You can reach Malcolm on twitter @malcolmatherton or email malcolm.atherton@thomsonreuters.com or office 480-634-1075.   His territory will be Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada.

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