My GP has a mug on his desk that says ‘please don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree’. People are more information hungry than ever, and when faced with a health problem the first instinct is to google it, just like everything else. We are used to finding everything at our fingertips, and being able to converse on any topic at any time.

So there’s a huge health conversation online, but the pharma industry is still largely absent from it, with only a few cases of pharma companies using social channels well. Why? Primarily a lack of confidence in how to manage social media without getting into trouble. But social media isn’t about selling drugs, it’s about having conversations. So surely we can get over this by now?

In the time pharma has been twiddling its thumbs, the social media universe has become much more sophisticated. The longer they’ve been absent, the harder it is has become to jump on board. It’s not about throwing out the odd tweet here and there, a social presence needs to be well considered, and the goals and objectives need to be realistic and defined.

In the end, it’s about being human. Approachable and interested rather than aloof and unreachable. It’s about having a conversation and allowing people to get to know you, engage with you, and to engage with them in return. It means you need to understand who you are talking to, and what they want or need to hear. It definitely takes commitment – if you’re going to do it you need to be confident you’re going to do it properly – which, I suspect, is why so many still haven’t taken the plunge.

Creating a connection with people you’ve never met is normal now, and it’s easy to assume that anyone who isn’t ‘out there’ simply doesn’t care enough to bother. They’re antisocial. The pharma industry has played a significant but silent role in people’s lives for a very long time, and now we have the chance to strike up a conversation. Let’s take it.

Being social used to mean being just that. Now it means almost the opposite – being glued to a device and barely making meaningful contact with other human beings in the real world.

Now, I’m not in any way against social media (that would be ironic for a post shared through social channels), but has our obsession been at the expense of real-life interaction, instead of in addition to it? Research has shown that virtual interactions don’t produce the same responses in the brain as interactions face-to-face. Even simple things like making eye contact with someone can increase dopamine and oxytocin, and decrease cortisol, reducing stress, increasing trust and improving mood.

And it’s much more powerful than that – Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad studied the impact of different lifestyle factors on how long we will live. She discovered that some of the physical factors we focus so much on, like being overweight or exercising regularly, only had a moderate impact on life expectancy, and the biggest predictors by far were whether or not people have close relationships and regular social interaction. Research by Prof Clive Ballard also showed that dementia patients spending just 10 minutes a day having a one-on-one social interaction can improve their quality of life, agitation levels and neuropsychiatric complications. That’s the kind of response we might only expect to achieve with hard drugs, not a simple chat.

Physical factors are obviously important, but the focus on physical vs psychological factors is clearly out of kilter. We could all improve our health and wellbeing, and expect to live longer as a result, if we preserve time in our busy lives for talking to people. For most of us that’s pretty easy, but not for everyone. In her recent TED talk, psychologist Susan Pinker stated that “social isolation is the public health risk of our time”.

Channel 4’s Old People’s Home for 4 Year Oldsrecently highlighted a beautiful example of how human interaction can improve our wellbeing. A group of 4-year-olds spent six weeks at an old people’s home, and in that time the senior volunteers showed dramatic improvements in their mental and physical health scores. People who felt they could only walk with a zimmer frame were seen chasing the little nippers around playfully, totally forgetting their physical inabilities. More anecdotally, the older participants said they felt more alive and that being with the children had been like having a shot of adrenalin. There it is again – human interaction having the impact we might only expect from a drug.

So, shouldn’t we be doing much more to recognise the power of human interaction in improving our mental and physical health? In the communications industry, everything we do is about having conversations with people, but it feels like we’re often so focused on how to talk to people, that we forget the importance of actually talking to people.

We need to make it happen. So go and find someone to have a chat with, and maybe you’ll both feel better for it.

We all know that clients increasingly need to do more with less. Marketing budgets are being cut continually, and expectations of ROI and proof of impact are higher than ever. In parallel, communications agencies are looking for ways to do more; with more focused, intelligent thinking and stronger creative. But this expertise comes at a price.

Agencies are left in a difficult position. With revenues and hourly rates heading south, margins are squeezed and cuts are inevitable. Agencies have always worked a certain way, and it isn’t a structure that can support the same commitment and expertise for a tighter budget. So when faced with the challenge of budget cuts, the solution is usually two-fold – put a less experienced (ie. cheaper) team on the business, and increase the number of hours to protect the final revenue number. This will keep the agency hitting its own targets in the short-term, but it isn’t a great solution for the agency or the client in the long-run, and the cracks will very soon appear. The client will feel there is a lack of commitment and the agency will feel the client doesn’t value their expertise.

This isn’t sustainable, let alone enjoyable. It’s a lose-lose situation that doesn’t produce good work or value for money. Instead, we need to recognise and embrace that times have changed. The challenge to do more with less isn’t going to go away, so rather than continuing to work with the same old model, we need to rethink the whole set-up. Agencies have always had layers of people, rigid structures that aren’t able to bend and flex to suit different needs, and margins factored in to cover big offices and staff downtime. It’s ok to challenge these things – in fact it needs to be done. Rather than trim around the edges, the answer is to think more creatively about how an agency works. And it’s simple – it needs trimmed back and agile structures, with bespoke teams tailored to specific needs rather than static teams sitting on the books waiting for the right work to come along. This meets the need to do more with less without compromising on the good bits. So rather than cutting the experience, expertise and motivation of the team, you cut everything else instead. The bits that will make absolutely no difference to how great an idea is, how effective a campaign can be, or the expertise an agency can bring.

Change is nothing to be afraid of – quite the opposite – it’s progress.