If the crew in 808 wanted to be on UU, we would have seen a lot more of them by now.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. We see a LOT of them. It was one of them who raised this whole issue to me. I didn't even know that page was there because I'm not a builder myself. You can see some of those builders reflected in the Likes on my posts, though, on both this thread and on the original pinned post.
Commercial makers have a sales and marketing plan. If they want UU in their plan, its not hard to join UU and start posting.
My career path has been anything but linear, but has included some long stints in product marketing. Most recently for a company you may have heard of, Avid. I was Senior Product Marketing Manager for their Media Composer family of video editors, with better than 90% market share in Hollywood. I worked closely with the Avid Audio team as well, makers of Pro Tools and Sibelius, among other stuff. I was also directly responsible for interfacing with my counterparts at Apple and Adobe. The current product manager manager for Premiere and After Effects is someone I trained.
Before that, I was both product manager and director of marketing for a smaller VFX software company. We plugged into just over two-dozen host applications. So to all of those companies, add pretty much anyone you'll ever encounter in the film and video production business.
I've also worked directly in marketing for video and film cameras, hard drives, and workstations. We're all gossipy as hens, and we talked about this stuff among ourselves
all the time.
And I can tell you two things:
1) There has never been a meeting that started, "Guys, we have a problem. They're talking about us again in the industry's biggest and most respected user group. How are we going to stop that?"
On the contrary. I've been in more meetings like this than I can count, and it's ALWAYS, "Guys, we have a problem. Nobody is talking about us in the industry's biggest and most respected user group. How can we
start that?"
2) Many companies have policies against their employees participating in user groups, because they're not necessarily users, right? They're commercial. And yeah, some members get itchy when they see official presences on boards, which is why even Kanile'a, the owner of this board, doesn't have much of a presence here. Me, I'd like to see more of it, but their feeling so far is that the people responsible for creating content here are US.
This listing was created as a public service by members here. If you don't want to use that service, you don't have to. And if anyone asks to be removed, we'd do it in a heartbeat. But it would be like asking to be removed from Google. Nobody doing any legit business is trying to hide.
So maybe there is a way to approach the industry and just list those businesses which are interested in supporting UU members, and leave the others alone?
My standing in the industry is lower than yours, I assure you. You've been here 10 years longer than I have, and you've probably bought ten times as many ukes.
I'm just a volunteer. If you'd like to take this on, I'll do everything humanly possible, and then some, to support you. But I would rather build on the years of work that our members have already done.
That said, I love this:
It might be cool to have an option for users to add themselves to a list of own/owned ukes from each builder....it might act as a sort of metric for which builders UU members gravitate towards and also interested ukeaholics could know who to ask about their experience with each builder.
Because Bill, I ONE MILLION percent agree with you that a raw list is worse than useless. It gives the impression that everyone is equally valued by the people here, and we know that that's not the case. So I'm all for some kind of crowdsourced validation to have the most responsive makers stand out.
This is also why I was looking for input on how best to identify the many, many builders active here.
We have seen posts complaining about the UU advertising, I have complained myself.
So have I! Long and loud! I repeatedly offered my volunteer services to help address our previously foul ads, and that's a big part of why I'm here as a mod at all.
I'm working on a longer post about this, but I spent all day Saturday retooling our ad lineup -- or at least the 1500 or so most frequently appearing ads. (We have somewhere in the low tens of thousands of ads over the course of a month, depending on page views.) I also used some sneaky tools to try to ferret out some of the variations that appear a little less often, but are no less offensive.
I blocked whole categories of ads (dating, for example), and have blocked hundreds more individually. I'm also reviewing at the very least our top 100 ads every single day. At the end of the day, Google's ad categories are only as useful as the least scrupulous advertisers using those tags, so there's a lot of work just to keep it at the current level of chaos...but oh em gee, it is SO much better than it was even on Friday!
Maybe there is an opportunity to sell advertising space on UU for ukulele industry businesses, and maybe it could be a business unit that services more than UU, like it could service other internet spaces and create an income stream to pay for people and stuff and profit?
Good idea, but two problems. One, I'm a volunteer, and don't have the bandwidth to build a new ad network. I can find people to help you do this if you're up for it though!
Two, for all that they are committed to keeping this a MEMBER-driven community, both Kanile'a and Ukulele Underground have been very public about the former now owning the latter. There are no ad salesmen here, and I don't know if there are any at Kanile'a...but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that there aren't. I can imagine any number of companies saying, "Wait, why am I going to take ANY of my much smaller revenue to put in your deeper pockets?"
***edit: I don't want to overstate Kanile'a scale, either. It really did start in Joe and Kristen Souza's garage just a few miles from where I'm sitting, and you can see for yourself that it's still a very small family business. This is also a very collegial business, because builders really do get that most people own more than one ukulele, and from more than one builder. But it's not at all typical in ANY industry for one company to just hand over money to another company for advertising. Multiple builders sponsor the same festival, yes, of course. Enya and Kamaka are fine both sponsoring Taimane.
Some collaboration, but there are definite limits. [end edit]***
Now having said that, I do have some ideas for later, some of which I've hinted at, and some of which I've yet to run by anyone here so I'll reserve comment on....
...but I'll end with a question. How many ukulele ads do you see? Like,
anywhere. I see makers sponsoring artists and festivals. (Yay!) They sponsor placements at Amazon, or have their own social media/YT channels....but ads? I've never seen even one. And as a non-salesman volunteer, I don't see any way possible to persuade an entire industry to do something that they're simply not.
Leaving member-generated content as not only the BEST way (especially to the extent that we can combine content with member CURATION) to approach this, but in practice, the ONLY way to approach it.
And I'm as certain of this as I am of anything in this life, that every single one of those makers, from the one-person shops to the giants, is grateful for any support we can offer them. They're supporting the broader ukulele community in other ways, and they deserve to be celebrated for it.
So let me come at this another way: rather than creating a COMPREHENSIVE list, what's the best way to come up with a CURATED list? And I don't mean curated by one of us. I mean curated by as many of us as possible.
I'm VERY open to suggestions.
Apologies for more answer than anyone was probably looking for.
And I truly hope that I don't sound argumentative. It's just that this whole area has been a huge part of my life for decades. My father was (and in his 80s, still is) one of the world's great marketing whizzes (among his "students": one Steven P. Jobs), and was teaching me about this stuff over the kitchen table when I was still in short pants.
And now I'm in Hawaii and in short pants again, still thinking about it 60-odd years later.
And for this century in particular, thinking about these kinds of outreach efforts that include advertising and traditional marketing, specifically in the context of community-building. It's exciting stuff! I know that we can do better, and we've already started. Best stuff still ahead!
Thanks!
Tim
and we can all be jealous of team MBU 
. In all seriousness, it might act as a sort of metric for which builders UU members gravitate towards and also interested ukeaholics could know who to ask about their experience with each builder.
