Wow, what a response. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As of 1:00 PM EST the VladCast #2 has been downloaded 10,372 times, nearly 1/5 the audience of the SBS Show. However, the feedback loop has been through the roof, the VladCast folder has 519 messages in the folder, granted a number of them back and forth between me and the audience thanking for feedback, etc. Care to see the feedback?

The Good

“Loved it – your voice energizes people and its great to hear your passion for all this again”

“I heard the first one and thought “Great, more complaining” but the second one knocked my socks off. I forwarded it to my staff and will make this a SharePoint link”

“Awesome Vladcast Vlad    – should have you streamed with my breakfast news before the weather and after the traffic.”

The Bad

These comments don’t deserve to be quoted, if you’re too stupid to hit stop when something does not interest you and you have enough time to waste my time by complaining about something you willingly both downloaded and listened for five minutes there is nothing I can do for you. As Jay-Z says “If you don’t like my lyrics you can press fast foward“

I did however get a decent amount of bad feedback that I will try to work on and improve:
- Not in iTunes yet
- Flash player sucks
- Slow down I can hardly understand you
- Board / wiki to disuss the show
- Mailing list to announce new shows
- Way to contribute / sponsor the show
- Needs intro music / datestamp
- Want to promote it, give me a logo
- Needs guests

Boards/forums suck because they close content, if you wish to discuss you’re welcome to post a comment. Guests are not what the show is about. 

The Funny

“That was perhaps the best podcast I ever heard. The first five minutes sucked but the last 5 seconds saved the genre”

“Exciting. Exilirating. Your voice was so fast.. like you weren’t breathing at all.. I was hoping a heart attack was coming so I wouldn’t have to hear your hateful dribble ever again. I hope you die next week.” (funny because it was written by a friend)

“You suck – at any length of the show.”

I’d be putting it lightly if I said that I was more than surprised with the success of the podcast considering it hasn’t been blogged or linked or marketed anywhere else. It confirms my suspicion though, that when content is awesome people share and forward on the links and thats why so many people tune in. The feedback and message counts are surprising as well, far more than I ever got with the SBS Show.

So if you heard #1 and thought screw #2 I hope you give it another chance. #1 was just to clear the air and announce it, there was no content in it at all. #2, I hope it proves differently.

So what are you REALLY doing?

This has come up more often than any other question. What’s really behind the scenes, whats the master plan, etc. Well, as you know from my many, many, many posts the contributions in the SMB community and even larger ITPRO sense have been down. In any given forum or board or group or setting less than 1% of the audience actually participates. Whats worse is that probably half of that 1% is not really contributing anything of value but just distracting and flooding the channel with a sales message.

I’ve talked to people over the last 2 years and I got two messages:

– I just don’t have the time (ok, great, see ya)

– I just don’t know how to contribute and I’m not a good writer like you.

For a moment lets ignore the scary notion in which people equate my writing with something more than a drunken chimp on a laptop. What these people are actually saying is that they have something they want to share, they have things on their mind, they know that others would benefit from their experience, opinion, expertise…. yet they don’t want to compete with me or Susan. Again, let’s for a moment ignore the solid gold mansions that Susan and I have built from our enormous proceeds we get from community paying for all of this content.

Last year I was presenting at the blogging conference and I wanted to share the podium with a fellow video blogger. And as he closed down his presentation he sent a very clear message:

I love doing this. This is fun. If you don’t know how to video Blog, my name is John, I will teach you how to video blog!

So.. I can’t teach you how to write. It’s clear that I can’t do it either. But what I will do is create a system and throw some exposure to the people that are willing to podcast and video blog. Everyone has something they want to share. I know you do. I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of people, all of em remarkable in some way. But none of them do this. Why?

I’ll tell you why. The SBS Show took 2 people, 5 hours a week and an hour here or there to organize, setup, record, edit, distribute, market, etc.

The VladCast took less than 10 minutes. Start to finish. So we’re not nurturing leaders and sharing – well, I’m gonna change that.

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