I had a great talk with Christopher Kusek and Bo Bolander at VMworld about life, the universe, and everything (including Life, the Universe, and Everything).

At one point, Christopher asked me what I did for Infinio.  When I explained I did our product marketing, he said, “Oh, so you write Infinio fan fiction.”  We all had a good chuckle.  “I’m changing my LinkedIn profile right away,” I said.

But do I write fan fiction?  I think that I’d be a pretty crummy marketer if that were true.  I’m not writing fiction about Infinio – like “oh here’s this environment Infinio could work in, but only in my imagination” or “use Infinio and world hunger will be solved”

The content I write for Infinio falls into one of a few categories.  In marketing we usually think of customers as in one of three buckets:

• Awareness – someone has a problem and they are beginning to research approaches to solving it
• Consideration – someone is zeroing in on an approach and looking at the specific vendors or solutions that solve the problem that way
• Decision – someone is close to deciding which solution they are going to use to solve their problem

An Awareness asset might be something like a 2-page “What is content-based caching” primer, a Consideration asset might be something like “5 things to look at when buying new storage” and a Decision asset might be a recorded product demo.

None of that is fiction.  Although I’ll admit – I am a fan of Infinio. 🙂