ENTREPRENEURS
ROGER J ONES
The Power of New. The key to unlocking the potential of digital is learning,
says strategist Roger Jones – and that requires thinking
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THE POWER OF NEW
FOR ME MEANS THAT
WHEREAS WE USED TO
DO ANALOGUE REPORTS
LOOKING BACKWARDS
ONE MONTH, NOW
WE RUN REAL-TIME
REPORTING AND
PREDICTIVE FORWARD
These changes could be anything:
a shift from offline to online selling,
from online selling to e-marketplaces,
from UK markets to export, or even the
migration to a new website.
A second major question then
becomes the degree to which
businesses allocate “thinking time”
to this transformation.
“A business needs to look at itself
and work out where it is on that
estate model and the shift between
one-to-many and one-to-
one communications
– then they need
to think
hard about that. There aren’t many
people who wouldn’t benefit from
having an hour of thinking time –
being able to take yourself out of
the operational and think for just a
moment ‘What if?’ or ‘How could
this be done better?’ or ‘Are we being
smart enough?’”
When it comes to “thinking time”
Actionable Insight practises what
it preaches, investing heavily in
knowledge – it dedicates one day a week
to learning and allocates considerable
time to studying markets, trends,
emerging best practices, online tools and
online platforms.
“The power of digital is profound:
the tools are already there to empower
businesses, to integrate thinking around
their web search, social media
content and customer
data,” says Jones. “So
the ‘power of new’ is there
and, in fact, the speed and
deployment of digital tools
can be really quick.”
But winning hearts and
minds can take
longer.
▲
A paradigm is a bit like a rug: if you
want to avoid falling over when it is
pulled from under your feet, you have
to shift your position – radically. No-one
understands this better than digital
strategist Roger Jones who has made
it his business not just to know which
direction the rug is being tugged in –
but to advise businesses how to stay
standing.
His boutique consultancy Actionable
Insight has pioneered data driven
decision-making to help businesses
unleash what he refers to as the “power
of new” amid the shift from the “4th
estate” of one-to-many communication
to the nascent “5th estate” of one-to-one
comms – a paradigm shift comparable to
the industrial revolution.
“Moving from that 4th to 5th estate
requires radical change and although
many businesses say they are continually
evolving, in actual fact they are not,”
explains Jones. “As much as people say
they are thinking forward we know the
reality of life – that you are operating in
the here and now and not a lot of time is
spent on this.
“The power of new for me means that
whereas we used to do analogue reports
looking backwards one month, now we
run real-time reporting and predictive
forwards – it is the fact that we are now
able to be extremely agile and think and
react in almost real time.”
Jones is passionate about analytics
– “helping people make really smart
decisions by looking for data trends and
turning them into success.”
“When I am explaining what we do to
clients – or even to my mum – I tell them
I can help them find the right people and
tell the right stories by looking for patterns
or trends in their data and turning those
patterns into money.”
Jones says that his first question to
clients is always: "When was your last
paradigm shift – the last major change
in your business model or systems of
working?"
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