With Valentine’s day quickly approaching, love is in the air. As we all creep closer to the terrifying realization that we had been skewered by a flying cherubic toddler, I wanted to write a short post before the weekend about a few folks who have given AirCut some press recently. This is a business where friends are the last thing we want to be without, so I wanted to share the love first, then the links to our recent press.

Thanks to Melissa from  Multi-Tasking Mama for coming to us regarding a sponsorship for Blissdom 2010. We jumped at the opportunity to sponsor a hard-working mom since hard-working moms are part of our niche, and Melissa has not disappointed. She has posted our ads and mentioned us to her followers. She also had a T-shirt with our logo printed and wore it to the conference! Very cool.

Thanks to the Waukesha County Chamber of Commerce here in Waukesha, Wisconsin. They have helped get us great exposure and notified me of social media events I have attended, including LinkedIn training with Wayne Breitbarth with M&M Office Interiors, who is a super guy (and a satisfied AirCut customer). The Chamber also worked with the Milwaukee Wave Soccer Team recently and put together a great reception and night of soccer for myself and other Chamber folks.

Thank you also to Chris Brogan, who took a slice of time recently to meet a group of us in social media, and even took a small slice of time to listen to my rambling 2-minute “elevator speech” about the AirCut haircutter and what I do in social media. He needs no help from me to promote him as he is already becoming a legend, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Here are the links to our recent press, including Melissa’s video review of our product:
~Video review of the AirCut by Multi-Tasking Mama
~Article about how our product can help moms save money on Inexpensively.com
~Recent article on our beginnings and our owner in the Living Lake Country Newspaper in Wisconsin

As a reminder, this blog is as much yours as it is mine. If you have a question, comment, observation, etc. that you would like to share, or if you would like me to dedicate some link love to you, please feel free to comment or email. Have a great weekend!

For years when I was a Systems Administrator, friends and family would ask me what exactly I did all day. For those of you whose occupation is self-explanatory (like a plumber, fire-fighter, etc.) I envy you. People just couldn’t understand how baby-sitting a network, even one attached to a $60 million company, was a full-time job.

Build your brand like you build your house!

As I have spent the last 3 years making the move to social media and brand marketing, but what I do day-to-day has now become even harder to explain. I tell people: ”I’m building a brand, and it’s like building a house. I take an awesome product like the AirCut. A product no one has heard of, and I create a foundation, walls, run wiring, and put the roof on. Eventually, I get folks talking about it.”

I’ve told that story several times, but I never realized how truly relevant that analogy is. Building a brand is EXACTLY like building a house, also because when the house is built, your work is not done. You still have to dust, vacuum, mow, rake, weed, shovel, etc. You have to MAINTAIN the house and yard and keep insects, mice, and burglars out. A brand is no different: Maintain your brand online, respond to customers so they don’t end up belligerent and scorn your brand. Most importantly, keep the lights on and always let your customers know you’re home .

I’ve had a couple of funny experiences lately with customers that I was hoping to share with you. I’ve changed the names as I did not persue their permission, but I wanted to just give you a picture of where we are in terms of our business development at AirCut. First, it bears repeating that the best part of coming to work every day for me is that I like what I do. I don’t just throw that out there because my boss reads this, I say it because it’s true. Admittedly, If I hated it here, I would tell it to a bartender instead of a blog. 

STORY 1
One day we received a call from “Jack” who had lots of questions about the AirCut. Jack had a curious nature and was really trying to decide if the AirCut was right for him. He had cut his own hair, but wondered what advantage it would be over a traditional clippers. After explaining the “no mess” and “easy to use” and “hard to make a mistake” highlights of our product, owner Norm asked Jack to think it over and take a look at our site. Norm also explained to Jack that he learned to use the AirCut and he was older than Jack, so if he could do it, anyone could. Jack’s response was “you’re older than 82?!”. Norm had to admit that Jack had him there. Norm then asked Jack cautiously about his internet access, to which Jack replied “I’m calling you from a rotary telephone, does that clear up me and technology?” Moral of the story: If you think you’re too old or too backward to use the AirCut, you don’t know Jack. 

STORY 2
We sell AirCuts to all types of people. On occasion, we have even sold AirCuts to minor celebrities and politicians. One of our sales to a politician recently required “Ted” to stop back to visit us after the sale. It seemed that the blades on Ted’s AirCut weren’t starting up right away. He could still use it just fine, but Ted wanted to know if it was a design problem or if that’s how it was supposed to be. We assured him that it was not supposed to be that way, and soon realized the problem was easily fixed with a new cord/transformer we had in stock. Don’t you wish more politicians would recognize when something wasn’t working the way it was supposed to? Heh. 

That’s it for today’s post. Just a heads-up that we are coming out with an iPhone app in the coming week. I’ll be talking about it right here, so stop back or subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss it! Don’t forget about the Twitter background contest, too!

Wisconsin Entrepreneur Offers Free Haircutter to Conan

Wisconsin Businessman Yerke pledges to send $100 haircutter to “help Conan find work”

 AirCut (http://www.aircut.com) company president Norman Yerke on Tuesday drafted an open letter to NBC Late Night Host Conan O’Brien via Facebook, Twitter, and Conan’s recent Craigslist posting offering O’Brien a free way to cut his hair at home in the even he was displaced from NBC and could not find work. An excerpt of the letter to O’Brien appears below:

 “…In your memo to the ‘People of Earth’ you said ‘Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.’ We don’t want you to have to apologize for your hair and we would be happy to send you a free AirCut haircutter to keep your hair looking perfect in the event you have to be out of work. We are huge fans and would not want to see you looking anything less than precisely and perfectly pompadoured.”

Owner Yerke said that because O’Brien’s settlement with NBC is only $40 million we knew he would need help in buying our $100 AirCut.    “We want to help Conan look his best and find work” Yerke said. AirCut might just make the cut, even if Conan doesn’t.

It is my distinct pleasure to announce AirCut.com’s newest contest: We would like you to design our Twitter background! Now through Valentine’s Day, we will collect entries from people all over the world, and at 1p.m. CST on Monday, February 15th, we will put YOUR wallpaper up, and leave it up, until we get tired of it (which, if it’s really good, could be never!). This contest only has 4 rules:

1.  The content must be original. Nothing copyrighted (you can use our logo ONLY for this contest) will be accepted. Also, feel free to put your name and contact info on it as well so you get the credit as long as it’s up.
2.  No pornography, hate speech, crude, or obnoxious images will be accepted. We are a legitimate business and represent ourselves that way. We do love color and creativity though, so please go crazy otherwise.
3.  You must be a Twitter follower of @air_cut (at least through Valentine’s Day, but hey, maybe you’ll want to stay). We only shower glory to those who choose to follow.
4.  Our contact info must appear somewhere including: company name, address, phone number, email, website and Twitter handle. Make sure the wallpaper is within Twitter specs, too. If you don’t know what they are, go here.

To enter:
Email your wallpaper to nyerke@aircut.com with your name, Twitter handle, email, and a short bio about yourself and your skills that we can share with the people when you win. Then, make sure you are following @air_cut on Twitter to find out if you have won! Winners will be notified by DM on Twitter, so make extra sure you are following! 

Good luck to all contestants and we hope to see some great entries! Our second and third place winners will get their wallpaper entries tweeted about and uploaded to Twitpic to be shared with our followers. Good luck!

Russ here from AirCut, blogging about this wonderful social media experiment that all of us in the arena of the traditional Sales and Marketing roles are now morphing into (it should also be noted that I was a pretty good IT guy babysitting networks before social media, also). I say “experiment” as a term of endearment for the trade, but I will also say that everyone in social media is experimenting. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

While we have come to recognize folks like Pete Cashmore at Mashable or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook as perhaps being toward the front of the pack as Social Media is concerned, we are all still learning this trade. I’ve seen this trend before: In IT and Website design. With those fields, it was because the technology just keeps changing so fast it was hard to keep up. But with social media, I think the reason has more to do with the fact that what CUSTOMERS want and what they ask for is always changing. As social marketers, we are always listening more than we are talking, but people don’t want the same things day after day or year after year. So we slowly traverse the slippery slope that is the customer’s needs and keep adjusting our social media footing accordingly.

I like to use the AirCut as my example because it is a great product and it’s why I come to work every day. We’ve gotten over 10,500 views of our videos on YouTube alone (almost as many on Metacafe and others) and shipped AirCuts to countries all over the globe, and yet every Facebook fan on our page matters to us. Every Twitter follower matters to us. Because each one is a voice of my brand, and listening to that voice and running experiments to find more voices is what I do. It’s how all of us at AirCut bring the brand to everyone from single guys to moms and from retirees to college kids instead of waiting for these folks to come to us. Companies take note: your brand is out here, do you know what’s being said about it?

You know, for those of us who do this day in and day out (and even on New Years eve…at 7 a.m….at a mall I can’t get into until 8 a.m….:) ) we all already know the AirCut works and that it saves time, money, and leaves no mess, however the biggest challenge we face is getting AirCut haircutters into people’s hands and actually getting them to try the AirCut. That is why testimonials like the one I received via email from Jayne in Watertown are so important.

Jayne visited our kiosk in Brookfield and saw that we were doing giveaways of AirCuts throughout December. Being the wise shopper that she is, she didn’t buy one because she thought she could go home and WIN one! As luck would have it she was right, and I shipped her a sparkling new AirCut just in time for Christmas. It should be noted that we do ask for feedback on our product as a trade-off for winning, but we don’t require the feedback to be good. Jayne’s unbiased, unpaid opinion appears below:

“Hi, we just wanted to send a note letting you know that we received our AirCut. I gave my husband a new haircut and absolutely loved it. It was so easy to use and he ended up looking like he had just gotten a professional cut. I was so impressed!! That night we had friends over and I even offered to cut the hair of one of the ladies. (I never would have dreamt of doing this before) We just gave her a trim but she was delighted. We were so happy with our new AirCut that we even went out and bought one to give as a Christmas gift to my mom and brother. Thank you so much. I was so excited…I spread the news of your product at work to anyone that would listen to me and showed them your website. Thanks again — I absolutely love your AirCut and will get many years of use with it!!”

This is just one of the many testimonials we have received on our product. See them all at https://www.aircut.com/testimonials.cfm and decide for yourself if you are ready to put one in your hands. We made a believer (and a paying customer) out of Jayne, give us a chance to make you a believer too!

Have a great New Years and thank you for reading the AirCut blog. We have more giveaways, contests, fun, and AirCut sales coming in 2010 so don’t miss out!!

Now I have to admit, I’m a little biased, but I have a great feeling about our sales goals for the AirCut for 2010. We launched our humble product and corresponding website in late August, and we’ve already outsold our predictions for it. Plenty of people thought owner Norm was crazy to launch a brand new invention in home haircutting in a recession. I have to admit that even I thought the idea was a little off the wall. Cut your own hair with a unit that looks like a hairdryer? Seemed unbelievable.

We have developed a kind of mantra around here that goes: “The more we sell, the more we’re going to sell”. The reason being that the AirCut does what it says and once people tell their friends, everyone is going to want one. 

We also don’t have the problem the “other guys” have to fight with…the fact that they have a good product, but do people really want to drag their vacuum cleaner out of the closet to get a haircut? Not to mention what the kids and the dog do when they see that vacuum coming. I’m sure your vacuum does great on your floors, but I’ve never seen anyone use a curling iron on their Berber carpet, so why use a vacuum cleaner on your head?

Ever since Al Gore invented the Internet and I became a regular user, shopping for me has been a beautiful thing. Clothing, running shoes, collectibles, even furniture showed up at my doorstep with nary an iota of a panic attack in a retail store was had. I am still social, but it was so easy to compare pricing and features I just couldn’t go back to traditional shopping again. Best of all, I never had to go to a mall during the holidays and find a parking space. It was bliss.

Now…we have a kiosk at the mall here in Brookfield, Wisconsin. A kiosk needs love and attention. We are selling our AirCut hair cutter from the kiosk and have recently added owner Norm’s golf tee invention also. We have a demo head of hair that we can show mall patrons how to use our product and great signage and flyers that people young and old seem to find interest in. We have a kiosk 25 steps from Santa Claus, for crying out loud! We have a great location and a great product…that needs constant restocking. A lot. This, owner Norm tells me, is where I come in.

As the “go-to” guy for much in our growing business, I don’t even breathe the word “no” for anything for this business. I am happy to go to the mall on a daily basis and make sure our staff is happy and the shelves are stocked, the signs are straight, and that everyone has visions of AirCuts dancing in their heads. But, guess who also has to find a parking space at the mall every day when he used to love shopping online? Me.

Also, for the record, parking in Santa’s reserved parking spot when your kiosk is 25 steps away can turn out badly for you. Take my word for it. 

Happy Holidays from owner Norm, Russ the Social media brat, Secretary–and all-around classy gal– Pat (God Bless you for putting up with us), and everyone at AirCut!

Make sure you check out http://www.freeshippingday.com to see all of the latest online retailers offering free shipping on December 17th! You know your friends at AirCut are there as we continue to offer free shipping all December long.

Also, we GUARANTEE your AirCut will arrive in time for Christmas if you are in the US and order by 5:00 CST on December 17th. Remember that we also have holiday pricing of five easy payments of $19.95 for our world famous (we can say that because we are now selling in Spain and Australia) AirCut home haircutting system! You can’t beat this deal!