If you live or work in a big city, you’ve surely encountered people who are paid to give out flyers or product samples to passers-by. But what amazes me about these street promoters is how much effort they waste on people who are the least likely to even look their way. Here are some signs that a given person isn’t worth pursuing:

– You’re selling tourist services like bus tours, and the person walking by is wearing a suit. This indicates they’re probably local, since tourists tend to dress, um, casually at best.

– It’s unexpectedly warm or cold, and the person is dressed totally wrong for the occasion. Chances are, the only thing on their mind is getting indoors or back home to fix that imbalance.

And my personal favorite:

– The person walking by is carrying a cooler, grocery store bag, or other parcel indicating there are perishable foods inside. Typically, when I’m carrying refrigerated items home, I’m not exactly a great candidate to stop and check out the latest sale on random crap, hop on a boat tour, etc.

I doubt that very many street promoters spend any time refining their craft, since it seems like a job that someone can only do for a short while before going crazy. But if there’s a few dedicated individuals out there, perhaps these tips can help them target their audience a little more effectively.

Whenever I have to spend time shredding stuff that a company sends me, it makes me a little more annoyed at them. Whether or not I have a business relationship with the brand, they’ve taken up my time by sending unwanted crap, or printing far too much detail on their statements and receipts. Here’s some advice to companies who produce this sort of paper: keep people’s names and personal details off your documents unless it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you’re chipping away at your own brand equity by inviting customers to associate your company with wasted time and a lack of concern for their privacy.

I know that I’m at least five years late to the whole podcasting thing. But given how long the medium has been around, I’m surprised that basic technical issues are still cropping up. And ironically, I’ve noticed these problems in user experience-focused podcasts — precisely the sort of people you would expect to get the details right.

Specifically, I’ve been listening to several recordings in an interview format. You’ve got the interviewer, and then one or more guests. In many cases, they are in different physical locations, so the volume of their voices varies considerably. This ranges from mildly annoying all the way to infuriating — especially if the volume gap is so large that you have to choose between not hearing one person, and getting a headache from the other person’s over-amplified speech.

While I’m sure it’s easier said than done, podcast producers and editors should try to keep all the audio within a fairly tight volume range. Since this is probably a pain to do during the editing process, the easiest solution is to conduct a more thorough sound check before recording. Have each person speak a few sample phrases, and then ask them to move closer to or farther from the phone, speak more loudly or softly, etc. With such a simple adjustment, the resulting podcast sounds more professional, and listeners’ ears will definitely thank you for delivering a better experience.

Everyone at WireSpring has been working their butts off to get our new FireCast Digital Signage EasyStart product completed. With the initial customer orders shipping next week, I thought it might be fun to talk about some of the businesses that could benefit from the product. These are all places I go to somewhat regularly, so I’m speaking from the perspective of an actual customer:

Yolk: This is a fantastic breakfast place in Chicago’s South Loop area. The lines are insane after 9 am on the weekends, so they could use the digital sign to entertain customers while they wait. I’m thinking profiles of their incredibly friendly servers, trivia, and local news and weather. Yolk could also use part of the sign as a menu board, displaying food pictures and prices to help people decide what to get before they even sit down at a table.

Ben Pao: Although you wouldn’t know it from the food, this is part of a decent-sized chain with many locations in the area. However, I bet very few patrons are aware of all the other restaurants that share the same parent company. So, they could use digital signage to display short clips about each of the other restaurants and offer a discount for trying them out.

Trader Joe’s: I buy about 90% of my food at Trader Joe’s, and it’s just a wonderful place to shop. Yet despite the incredibly devoted customer base, there are many people who pass by the store all the time yet seem to have no idea what it’s about. So, Trader Joe’s could put up digital signs facing out the window. These would show popular food items along with how much you save compared to Whole Foods or even the big box stores like Target. Plus, they could repurpose content from their excellent newsletter to help promote new products on the screens.

Now I just need to cram a demo player and screen into my bag for the next time I visit these fine establishments. And given the focus on dining and grocery, I also need to keep reminding myself that free food is not an acceptable form of payment for the product.

I think you can learn a lot about a company’s culture by asking the lowest level, front-line employees how they like their job — or just observing their unspoken behaviors. It might be tempting to assume that the nature of the work outweighs any company to company differences. For instance, working more than a few months as a grocery store cashier might just be an unpleasant experience. However, if you look at how job satisfaction differs from say a Trader Joe’s to a Jewel or Dominick’s, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

After some encouragement from my wife, I finally bought an iPod. Granted, it’s a last-generation Shuffle, which is super basic, but that’s all I wanted right now. It’s funny it took me so long to buy one, since I work with software and other technology all day long. Perhaps working with this stuff for a living has made me averse to taking on any new gadgets, since it takes time to keep each new item running. But this also makes me wonder how you market to people who are high-tech by trade, but near-luddite in their personal lives.

Perhaps the answer is a marketing pitch based on ease of use and ease of ownership. Marketers could interview other similar professionals and have them talk about how well the product integrates into their lives, without any of the usual tech hassles. Whatever the solution, one thing’s for sure: Apple is very lucky that other people aren’t like me. Otherwise, they barely would have sold 50 iPods by now.

The last few years, I’ve been very impressed with the creativity of corporate “announcements” on April Fool’s Day. Typically, these are intended to garner some press and foster word of mouth through their humor or outlandishness. But I wonder: is there any room for serious announcements on April 1? Frankly, I have no idea how normal announcements, like a press release about a new product, would perform on that day. But it would certainly be an interesting experiment to try, along with tracking the eventual press and blog and Twitter mentions in the period following the release.

A few days ago, I got a catalog in the mail from a website that I haven’t shopped at in months. On the cover was a prominent offer for “Free shipping”. I quickly scanned the rest of the front and back cover for any further discounts, like a $10 off $50 coupon. No luck. Seeing as how this catalog had little to offer me, I discarded it.

Was I being fickle? Perhaps. But I think my behavior is typical of many consumers these days. Sure, free shipping is known to increase conversion rates, but I would argue that’s mainly among customers who are predisposed to make a purchase. For people who haven’t shopped with you in a while, you’ll need to do better. And that typically means a discount targeted towards reviving your dormant accounts.

Most retailers already segment their mailings and email campaigns based on purchase histories. So really all you need to do is switch on those customer reactivation campaigns a little earlier, and give them more punch. Instead of sending a $10 coupon to people who haven’t bought something in a year, try sending a $20 coupon to customers who have been inactive for six months. By using this approach, you’ll capture the attention of existing shoppers who are looking for better values. Plus, you’ll remain front-of-mind for them when the economy improves, giving you the chance to turn those value-oriented shoppers into high-margin repeat buyers.

With all the ads promising to save you money these days, I’m surprised that more companies aren’t talking up the old adage, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Actually, even those that do take this approach usually fail to point out the best part of it. Specifically, saving a penny is even better than earning a penny, since earnings are subject to taxes, but money you save from after-tax earnings is entirely yours to keep.

For example, say that your marginal tax rate (including income tax, social security, medicare, etc.) is 25%. This means that for every extra dollar you earn, you’ll keep 75 cents. Doing the math, to net a whole dollar in extra take-home pay, you’d have to earn about $1.33 in additional salary. If you’re curious, the formula for how much you have to earn in order to net out a dollar after taxes is 1/(1-marginaltaxrate), which in this example is 1/(1-.25). In any case, saving a dollar through smarter shopping helps your finances more than earning a dollar more at work.

What should advertisers do with this? At a minimum, I’d like to see some ads that talk about how much a typical shopper might save each month — along with the salary increase that it’s equal to. Sure, they’ll have to use some assumptions to figure out the typical tax rate of their shoppers, and make those assumptions clear in the ads. Some customers might even find the ads misleading. Even so, I think people deserve to know that the old adage holds true today, and that every dollar they save might pay off more than they expected.

Most of the new construction near me was already close to completion when the financial meltdown hit full boil. Those buildings were so far along that halting work made no sense. However, there’s one building nearby that was only 20 or so stories into the 90 that were planned, leaving a stubby shell of a building in an otherwise gleaming downtown district.

If the builder runs out of money, and nobody else wants to buy up the property, what should the city do? Sure, the bank that financed it will assume ownership, but what about the partially built structure sitting on the lot? One approach might be for the city to take over the project. They could build it out enough to make the existing shell usable, and then turn it into a city university campus, library, or other public venue. Then, once the economy picks up again, they can sell or lease the property to someone who wants to resume construction.

In return for providing necessary capital in desperate times, the city would be paid back handsomely. After all, they would have acquired the property at a bargain price. Is this type of plan even remotely feasible? I have no idea. But anything is better than letting an uninhabitable stump sit there and decay while everyone waits for things to get better.