When Nokia announced plans to resurrect its iconic 3310 mobile in February last year everyone over the age of 30 thought; ‘amazing, Snake!’ But this is just one example staff at our agency have noticed where tech companies, industry analysts, and, most significantly, doctors are trying to get people to unplug from the online world more frequently. Health aside, drafting in the digital pros to take on this side of working life might also make real business sense, too.

The Light Phone also made headlines amongst publications such as Dezeen for its minimalist design when it was unveiled in May. It promotes people to use the device ‘as little as possible’, the idea being you’d buy this as a second handset, allowing you to switch off from the smartphone when out of office hours, while still being contactable.

There have been widespread warnings about the pitfalls of over-exposure to the Internet for some time, hence infographics like this one, created way back in 2012.

Bringing things more up to speed, in December 2017 Facebook publicly admitted social media could be bad for people’s health, while a former executive at the firm was even more scathing of the digital Goliath.
As a comms agency, Smoking Gun’s remit covers everything from PR to content marketing and social media, and as such we’re only too-aware of how much time it takes to run a decent digital campaign, build a strong online brand presence, and service customers, fans and followers to the degree they now expect from brands.
Breeze Digital Media published some interesting stats and facts to back up the notion that digital marketing should be left to the experts, thus freeing up invaluable in-house manpower and hours for the actual running of a business. These included:
*The average blog post takes 1-3 hours to develop
*Scouring the Internet for brand mentions takes around 4 hours per month
*Most companies spend around 6 hours per week dealing with social media
This is barely scratching the surface of digital duties, so to put all that another way let’s quote directly from Breeze…

“You’ll need to spend roughly 34 hours per month to create engaging social media posts, two blogs per month, fix your citations and respond to online reviews.”

With this in mind, the idea of outsourcing digital may seem like a risk, but using well-regarded, proven agencies can offer a cost-effective solution to the problem of stretched resources, while also reducing how much staff get caught in the infinite world of online, which could be good for their health.
Just a thought.