Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Work-Life Balance?

I'm on a site check to see if the event venue where I'll be holding an event coming weekends has good internet connection. And as I am done with the routine job, I simply continue logged on at the cafe nearby for a tea as well as to catch up on some industry news. A man sits besides me, doing his daily charting for the financial market.

Last Sunday I was at our Prime Minister's National Day Rally. (In case you are wondering, I'm located in Singapore) But it was also the most historical moment in Singapore's sports history as our women's table tennis team was playing in the finals of the Olympics. Being a big national supporter, I quickly logged on my pda via GPRS to load the live scoreboard as the PM is speaking. And I was able to visualise the live game as I'm attempting to digest the bulk of information on policies and economy fed by our PM. What a way to multi-task.

One of his topic was on work-life balance. Judging on the way we are capitalising technology in our daily lifes, I think the definition of work-life balance has sort of changed. It iterally means work is life and life is work. It is hard to make a balance of something that you do naturally that has integrated into your every day. Of course, as in my previous post, not everyone is as savvy. However, the netizen numbers are rising by the day with our Generation Z entering the society. Kids are beginning to "facebook" as young as 7 years old! (my cousin...) And tutorials are now uploaded into school's server for student's access. Welcome to the virtual-real world. There isn't any virtual or real world. It's just an integrated way of living. And looking at the current trend, apparantly those who does not follow will be left behind quite soon.

And back to marketing, there isn't really such a thing as "traditional marketing" and "digital marketing". Marketeers should identify the fact that both co-exist and it is absurb to distingush the two as separate entities. Marketeers should be where the consumers are, not where they feel most comfortable in. Comfort zones are never a game in the marketing arena. Recognizing that and we can take a big step into the integrated marketing era.