As of January 1st, DoctorDave Computer Repair is no longer a member of the Lawrence Giveback program. This was a difficult decision for me but ultimately I think it’s best for our customers and the program. I’d like to explain why we left and what we are doing different.

DoctorDave Computer Repair had been a paid member of the Lawrence Giveback program for years and while it wasn’t bringing in customers (and therefore money for the charities), I realized the importance of supporting the program in order to keep it alive. Similar to many “startup” style companies, the program became so successful that it was purchased by the World Company and the Lawrence Journal World. Congrats to the program.

As a company, we continued with the program after the buyout because we believed in the program and the Journal World has increased awareness. However, after examining the finances of it, we weren’t spending money efficiently. Charities are often judged by how much overhead they have and how much money actually goes towards actual charitable operations. In our case we were paying close to $500 in fees a year to be a member of the program but we gave to back to our clients and customers less than $50 in 2012 and felt it simply wasn’t in our best interest, our client’s best interest and most importantly the charities’ best interest for us to continue. That $500 could be better spent giving money directly to the charities. Other businesses pay $89 or more a month for the program in addition to paying for the donations to the charities and the points to the client.

I waited to post this blog until someone actually asked about our program membership, and the fact that it took this long for someone to notice reinforces that our membership in Giveback wasn’t bringing in income for the charities. The program is great and I have the utmost respect for it, but our administrative fees in the program were too out of sync with the donations we were making to continue with the program. $500 a year could do a lot of good in this community if we gave it directly.

What we are doing instead is an experiment. We’ll give you 5% off the labor charges for your next visit and give 5% to the charity of your choice in exchange for one thing from our clients: some exposure on social media. Word of mouth referrals are vital to a small business like ours and one way of doing that is to “check-in” with us via Facebook, Foursquare or Yelp. Here’s how to do it.

First, realize you don’t need to be at our office on 6th Street to do it. Most services will allow you to check in via your mobile phone or website from any location. Our technicians would be happy to help you with this process (takes less than a minute)

Next, go ahead and “tag” the charity of your choice and say “DoctorDave is giving 5% to“ and then name your charity along with saying “computer repair” or the like and mentioning that you got 5% back. Show your technician the check in on your phone or browser and they’ll note your service order with the 5% discount on a future order and we’ll send you a credit voucher via email. For example

“DoctorDave is giving 5% to the Lawrence Humane Society and to me after fixing my computer”

Make sense. It isn’t as elegant as a loyalty card, but it’s our way of thanking our customers for their loyalty and maximizing our donation to the community. We’ll also start giving to auctions and raffles again, so please let us know if we can help your organization with a gift certificate for free service.

Yelp has been in the news quite a bit lately with Amy’s Baking Company blaming Yelp reviewers for “endangering their lives” and a San Diego law firm succesfully suing Yelp in small claims court. Yelp is on the defensive and blogged about the fact that advertising does not impact which reviews get filtered. I agree there is no “conspiracy” regarding filtered reviews. I don’t believe Yelp will suppress negative reviews based on being a “Yelp Sponsor”. However, based on the information they disclose in the review and my personal experiences, Yelp indeed indirectly manipulates both the placement and the filtering of reviews.

Yelp’s claim that the filter is fully automated is false

Yelp claims “Yelp’s automated software is designed to protect both consumers and small businesses” I don’t disagree with that assertion. The goal is to automate the screening process to make sure that fake reviews get blocked. However — and for some this may come as a surprise — software is engineered and not born. Yelp didn’t go to the cabbage patch and pluck this filter from a row of eagerly awaiting software programs and a stork didn’t deliver it on their doorstep. Software is written by people and as such can be flawed, manipulated and tweaked. That’s logical. Moreover, software needs to be updated and modified based on changing conditions. If Yelp didn’t do that, the filter would eventually completely fail as savvy marketers game the system.

While Yelp probably can’t move reviews in and out of the filters based on advertising contracts, they could set flags or conditions in their automated software that could penalize a business by filtering more of their reviews. This is common in spam filters–the more suspect reviews a particular business has the more it will logically have in the future and therefore it should be more filtered. Could Yelp mark a business as “advertising contract rejected” and filter those reviews more? Absolutely. Does that contradict Yelp’s claims they don’t manipulate individual reviews for advertisers? Absolutely not. In fact the claims by Yelp are only about individual reviews, not businesses as a whole. I was offered advertising for DoctorDave Computer Repair in Lawrence, KS and said no….and guess what, 70% of my reviews are filtered.

Yelp’s claim that 20% of reviews are filtered is unsubstantiated

Yelp claims

“Yelp uses automated software to showcase the most helpful and reliable reviews from among the millions submitted. Those that don’t make the grade — about 20 percent — are posted to a separate Filtered Review page.”

This number is wholly inconsistent with my personal experiences as a consumer and a business owner. In my case, 70% of the reviews are filtered out by Yelp. I know each of these clients as we have great relationships with them and I can assure you all are real people. While I have no statistics to back up my claim (neither does Yelp provide audited statistics of their claims), the smaller the business the more likely the reviews are to be filtered. Why is this? I suspect advertising. Smaller businesses need cheap marketing more than a larger business that could afford large ads all over the internet. Could refusing an advertising contract cause reviews to be filtered more? Possibly. Yelp doesn’t disclose how the filter works so my guess is as good as yours, but the 20% number doesn’t seem to hold up for small business. My prediction is at some point they’ll be forced to disclose how the filter works because they can’t claim they don’t manipulate the filter if they fail to disclose how the filter operates.

Yelp’s policies are extremely biased against small business

Yelp has an “Elite” program that rewards reviewers with an Elite badge. Elite reviewers have special rights: their reviews are never filtered, their reviews appear first, and they receive invites to special events. What’s the problem here? Sounds like an awesome deal! Quality and active reviewers get featured and rewarded for their hard work. Here’s the catch:

“I am a local business owner. Can I still be Elite?”
Negative. We value all that you do as a Yelper and love your perspective; however, we’ve got to put fairness first. Being a business owner or being closely affiliated one (think spouses, general managers, social media managers, etc.) could present a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one. As a business owner, you can understand that it would feel desperately unfair if a competitor was coming into contact with the Elite Squad constantly while you weren’t. Ya dig?”

Ouch. Notice how broad that exclusion is. If you are involved in operations of a business in any way (or married to someone who is), you get excluded from Yelp Elite. That’s pretty broad and I think one reason the results are skewed with the filter, especially related to small business. Frequently with small businesses, everyone is in a management capacity in some way as we don’t have too many “non-involved” staff. Everyone is a stakeholder and given a responsibility in the business. These people understand the importance of word of mouth advertising and what it takes to be involved in a business and thus are more likely to be fair and objective in reviews.

Yelp’s Elite policy, by definition, rewards ignorance of business. If you are related to someone who runs a business, your reviews are unfairly placed below the Elites. If this were by industry and geography that makes sense. A manager at restaurant A shouldn’t be able to influence reviewers of restaurant B. However, if someone is the social media manager at a chiropractor’s office, or is a warden at the local jail, does it make sense as an Elite that a conflict of interest could arise if they review a restaurant? Highly, highly unlikely. The only conflict is with the quality of reviews: someone who understands business is more likely to write a quality review.

To make matters even worse, if you own a business, if your relative owns a business or you become friends with the business owner, you can’t review that business. Heck, you can’t even be in a group with that business. If you are in any kind of networking group such as BNI, a Chamber of Commerce or even Social Media Club, your reviews are considered less valuable. That’s covered in the content guidelines

“Conflicts of interest: Your contributions should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write reviews of your own business or employer, your friends’ or relatives’ business, or businesses in your networking group.”

Who does that leave left able to review reviews? Someone that has no connection with any business or anyone who owns any business. They don’t become friends with the business owner or staff. They don’t have friends of family that work in any management capacity with a business. That’s the real filter and goes way beyond conflict of interest: reviewers must have no connection to the business world at all and the more successful you are at your job (and probably make more money), you are more likely to have your reviews demoted/filtered or simply removed for violating content guidelines. Yelp breeds ignorance so it’s no wonder small business owners are frustrated.

Why care about Yelp at all for a small business, especially one that isn’t a restaurant?

Wired magazine recently showed the silliness of Yelp reviews and if you go by the flow chart, this isn’t a big deal, but really it is.

In my other job as a writer for GigaOM, I discuss the importance of Apple maps integration with Yelp and how Yelp will skew the results. Google also highly rewards Yelp reviews in search results (search computer repair lawrence kansas and see for yourself). Regardless of industry, word of mouth is important. Right now, my reviews are fine and the fact that 70% of my reviews are filtered hurts only because people take the time to write about me and are penalized and punished because it’s my business they are writing about and Yelp is filtering them out. It’s supposedly an automated process, but humans who work at Yelp wrote it. For other businesses such as Wicked Broadband, the fact that the quality reviews are filtered is disappointing and directly impacts the livelihood of their employees. Online reviews are critical to business and Yelp’s filtering out reviews of anyone involved with any business along with it’s so-called “automated filter” hurts small business’s that rely on such reviews

While I don’t necessarily agree that there is a conspiracy to take down a business like Amy’s Baking or another theory that Yelp has a “delete” button for advertisers to remove negative reviews, the facts speak for themselves and until Yelp change’s its policy regarding “conflict of interest” for both Elites and “commoner” as well as discloses discloses the details of the Yelp review filter, small business will continued to be hurt by Yelp, which ironically makes them less likely to want to advertise.

P.S. I can’t ask for reviews of my business on Yelp so I won’t

A few months ago I blogged about having suffered “Google Death” aka “We Currently Do Not Support The Location.” While I occasionally have blips in life, my Google listing on Maps continues to be a problem. I recently read this article about how business owners fail to control their business identity and it really shocked me

A study released by Constant Contact, a marketing company, indicates that 49% of businesses have never updated their listing online but, just as shocking, 70% say they don’t have time to manage their listing. That’s amazing. They spend money to market themselves on services such as Constant Contact but fail to take ownership of information about them online. Similarly, Yext‘s research had equally scary statistics such as the fact that 37% of businesses have incorrect information about themselves online and 18% don’t have their correct phone number listed. Ouch. Guess that is consistent with Woody Allen’s famous quote that “80% of success is showing up.”

My business day starts like every other biz owner: I get my cup of coffee and check communications such as voice mail and email. That’s incoming communications and that takes top priority. The next thing I do is search for myself online. I’ll Google computer repair lawrence ks, laptop repair lawrence, ks and a few other search terms in regular search, image search and map search. Not only am I checking our rankings with Google , but I’m seeing what third party services Google is listing such as the Lawrence Journal World Marketplace.

When a new service pops up, I make sure we’re listed properly. On a monthly basis I’ll check other top services such as Bing and Yahoo on a computer and my mobile phone. These are the top three to be concerned about, but remember that Yelp provided data to Apple’s iOS maps so I’m sure to check listings there.

A great service to check all the smaller services at once is Getlisted .
Ironically many of these systems still list our old address of 2104 W 25th St, # E12, which we haven’t been at for 4 years! In each of these systems I “claim” our listings and ask for a correction.

If you have a business online, the linked article is an important and vital wake up call that should make checking your online listings a regular part of your business. Making sure your information is out there and accurate is absolutely vital and without protecting this information, your marketing efforts suffer a serious setback.

Wow. Just Wow. That was my response to this story about a child drugging their parents in order to get her internet privileges back.

Restricting and monitoring children’s use of the Internet is a question we often get. Fortunately on a Mac, parental controls are built into OS X and I’m a big fan of them. On a PC I’m less enthusiastic. Windows has rudimentary controls built in but clients often supplement these protections with third party products. These third party products though often make repair of Windows difficult after malware so I actually advise against them.

What often works better than blocking or monitoring software on the computer is to configure the router to block certain sites or traffic at certain times. Apple’s Airport routers have some of this built in as well as third party routers and services such as Open DNS. This allows the computer to operate normally and lets us easily fix the computer.

However, instead of sophisticated controls, we often recommend the more analog solutions my father taught me years ago. When my car privileges were revoked, he disabled something in the car only he knew how to fix. I suspect it was maybe unplugging the battery, but to this day I don’t actually know what he did because I wasn’t car repair savvy.

We recommend to parents locking up the keyboard or removing the wireless adapter or network cable. Sure the kids could go to the store and buy one of these devices to bypass you, but they’ll only be able to do that once.

Ultimately, even with a locked down computer, kids can be creative. Mobile devices give them access and they can always go to a friend’s house to use their internet.

When Dad didn’t let me use the car, I went to my friends down the street and had his Mom take me where I needed to go. Didn’t even need to spend gas money–or drug my parents.

We often do computer repair in Lawrence for businesses running out of a small office or a home office and we often see “mixed use” settings. When a computer is used for personal and business activities that can be a recipe for trouble in some situations.

For example, when a work computer is used at home, often sensitive company information is located on the hard drive. When kids or other family members use the computer they can unknowingly share that information with others. Sometimes it can be as simple as attaching the wrong file to an email or something more serious like exposing the computer to a virus. All of a sudden you’ve put your work computer, and your entire company at risk. Not a good idea.

Moreover, anything on that computer may be the property of the company. That means that at anytime someone could look at that information and put it on file. Any website you’ve been to or any email that was sent from that computer may and often is viewed by others. What we typically see is more the embarrassing situations such as the last page pulled up may not be something you want your coworkers to see (and it’s not just Facebook!)

An interesting wrinkle to using a company computer for personal use is when that computer is used for a side job. This story of a state employee disciplined for personal use of a work computer was of particular interest to me because so many of our clients work for the University of Kansas, the City of Lawrence or the State of Kansas. If you are doing personal work, especially work that makes you money, that may put you in conflict of interest or otherwise violate policies. Could answering emails for your consulting business put you in trouble in Kansas? How about answering Tweets on a state owned computer? Good question and based on what happened in Kentucky the answer may be yes!

Is malware a form of free speech?

While some malware is created for mischief or money, others are created to make a point. For an extereme example check out this story in which a Congressman’s office was attacked , but given the global nature of the Internet hacks can come from anywhere.

In particular, journalists are being attacked simply because they wrote stories negative towards the Myanmar government and Twitter accounts such as Jeep and Burger King were recently attacked. The reasons are unclear why these companies were singled out at this time, but the account of a former Westboro Baptist Church spokesperson was attacked by “Anonymous” for its mocking of the Sandy Hook massacre.

Removing malware for a living makes me particularly concerned about these type of activities. Regardless of my political opinions, I don’t see cyberterrorism as a legitimate form of protest because these activities can easily be used by non-activists for purposes of mischief and money. I’ve written before about small businesses being targeted for hacking as well as individuals. I admire these hackers’ dedication to their cause but a society that accepts hacking as a form of legitimate political discourse is unacceptable. Similar to biological weapons, the tools of hacking don’t take political sides and eventually in the wild can wreck havoc on individuals and organizations.

In our line of work we encounter lots of passwords. We always try to turn our heads while doing our computer repairs to allow clients to enter their passwords but sometimes when a computer is left for repair at our office (4105 West Sixth Street, Lawrence, KS) a written password is necessary. Too often customers can’t remember a password so they write down a series of them (we promptly shred the papers with the password)

This great article talks about how “clever” passwords really aren’t at all and the hackers know to replace an O with a zero and a e with a 3. The article ends with great suggestions on creating and remembering passwords – be sure your password isn’t on this list.

For iPhone and iPad users, using “accented” characters is a quick and easy way to increase the security of your device/

The latest type of virus we are seeing a resurrgence on laptops and desktops at DoctorDave Computer Repair of Lawrence, KS are what is commonly referred to as a “Ransomware Viruses”.

These are viruses that claim the FBI is monitoring your computer and to send money, or somehow your computer has a failing hard drive or other problems. The viruses prevent you from doing anything until you pay them money. Some clients actually pay money and all that does is put their credit card at risk and doesn’t return the computer to a usable state.

The New York Times did a great story on this problem recently and answers, partially, the question of how and why this type of malware is created. This isn’t just a US problem and a international ring of scammers behind some of these attacks were recently caught in Spain.

According to the report by Interpol, the scam was spread over thirty different countries and included a motley crew of Russians, Ukrainians and Georgians arrested in Dubai and Spain who netted $5 million dollars a year and yes, once you pay the ransom, they also steal the credit card for further scams.

While they caught this major ring, they proved clearly that crime can pay and while this ring was broken up the tactic is a money maker I expect to see grow and morph and very sinister ways.

Myself and all of my technicians view our relationship with clients as one of trust and respect. We realize that customers rely on us for computer repair in Lawrence Kansas and we’ve got a great reputation. When items are under warranty, or should be under warranty we’ll either suggest the client call the company directly or call on their behalf.

Sometimes this can be a recipe for disaster and no company is immune from problems. In some cases the rep promises a repair is free and then later change their mind or simply repair the wrong item and charge once again to fix it.

Arrrgh.

What about having a warranty and then waiting over a month to get the computer back. The latest scam is to upsell you services you don’t need, such as what Dell is doing

The more disturbing stories are direct violations of your trust. Those really annoy me. The late night infomercial programs are selling you snake oil that will harm your computer. In particular, this story about how Apple retail stores can operate is shocking. You absolutely have to know who is working on your computer. We do full background check on all technicians and anyone who touches your computer. All someone needs is a few key pieces of info while working on your computer to steal your identity as this scam reveals how easily your tax return can be stolen.

When these problems happen, you need to complain effectively and here is a great guide as well as a blog post I wrote about this a while back.

It’s not just my industry that’s the problem, unethical employees abound elsewhere – such as taking bribes to lower a bill or dentists offering up unecessary procedures to pocket insurance money.

Every once in awhile we get weird questions such as “How much will you save me if I pay you in cash and you don’t report it to the IRS?” or “Can I pay you to download me a pirated copy of this software?” or “Don’t you technicians know how to get around installing software on more than one computer?” We will engage in none of these activities and will end the relationship with a client if they pressure us to do so, even if they threaten us with a negative review (our only negative review as of this writing).

Really, do you want someone working on your computer who engages in such unethical behavior? If you do, please call someone else