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Tech Tips

Seeing the Sites – Telemarketing Scam Defense

by T.J. Lee
The connected age we now live in has brought us both great wonders and significant evils. What’s interesting is that the same technologies are often used for both.

One tool that can, and is, often misused is the telephone. Once the most annoying thing you were subjected to was a call, always at dinner time, which turned out to a telemarketer sales call. But the number of scams, spams, and serious whams that can come from seemingly innocent telephone calls has skyrocketed.

Ever get an odd call in voicemail or on your answering machine with instructions to call back right away? Do you call, not call, is it real, a trick, a trap? Before you dial check with this interesting site to see what’s what with the return number.

http://800notes.com/

You can type in a number and find out if it’s a known scam, or if others have been getting the same calls as you. You can also tap into the latest news on Do-Not-Call lists, telemarketing scams both domestic and coming from overseas, as well as articles about your telephone rights, what to do if you are getting harassing phone calls, how to file complaints with the appropriate government agencies and more.

What’s nice is that all of the pages provide for reader comments so you can benefit from the experience of others with the topics being discussed.

Everyone’s Talking… So What About The Economy?

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

I’m coming off a marathon couple of weeks of travel… I’ve been to Council Bluffs, Iowa (near Omaha) for a peer group meeting and to Nashville, Tennessee for a marketing seminar. The one constant everywhere I visited was conversation about the economy. It’s the main topic on every news cast, every news paper article, and every news radio program.

Economists are calling what we’re experiencing a “precession” rather than a real recession. Activity is stalled because everyone’s scared. This isn’t to say that the economic pressures aren’t real – I talk with clients every day who are experiencing slower sales and slowed collections.

In our business, we’ve not seen a significant decline in sales so much as we’ve seen clients slowing their payments. Companies that paid regularly within our net 10 terms are now paying in 30 days. Clients who paid in 30 days are paying at 45. I think everyone is hoarding their cash because they’re scared and not sure where things are headed.

Whatever the terminology – slowdown, precession, recession, decline, etc. – that this is the perfect time to be working on our businesses to really take advantage of the situation. What do we need to do when times get a little tougher? Adapt and change! Here are a few thoughts for consideration.

Cash Is King
We need to evaluate how cash leaves and enters our company. Can we cut some outgo or speed up some inflow? We need to watch cash because he who has it will win. Cash flow is a critical thing to take care of. Watch your A/R and keep it collected. Cut back where it makes sense. Evaluate how the money flows.

Reinvent!
In our business, technology, processes and procedures change constantly. We have to reinvent ourselves pretty regularly to survive. There is no better time than a difficult one to see what needs to be changed or improved in our companies. There are likely things that need to go, and new things that need to be added. Think carefully about your business and what should continue to be part of it.

Get Outside Your Box
Forget “But we’ve always done it that way.” Don’t let the norm be the norm – look outside your comfort zone and consider all options. You can’t allow the rut to keep you on the wrong path. Creative thinking and planning will be key to coming out of this on the other side.

Plan Carefully!
Planning is always important but never more important than when times are tough. You need to make sure you have a solid plan and your team understands it. There is no money or time to waste, so your plan needs to keep everyone working toward the same goals.

Market Your Business!
We have a client, John Poniewozik from Iceberg’s One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning, who has his business marketing down! His promotions are unusual and attention getting. Have you seen his penguin television ads or direct response letters? They’re really great. You might think some of our marketing is unusual, and I admit that it is.
But I think that is the key to why it works! Doing the same old boring stuff that every other business with whom you compete is doing, makes your business blend into the background. There is no differentiation – if you market like everyone else, there’s no way to tell why your business is better.

I have a friend who is a marketing consultant, and she often talks about how business owners fall into the habit of “ego based marketing.” They think “my clients are different” or “my customers would never respond to that type of marketing.” Baloney! Customers are craving something different. Use that to get their attention and get them to buy from you instead of your competition.

Execute
As business owners, I think we have a tendency toward perfection. We want everything our companies do to be 100%. I suffer from this myself, and it has been difficult for me to learn and accept that 95% is good enough 95% of the time. We get stuck sometimes in “paralysis by analysis” mode and keep “working on things” and never “getting things done.”

Execute on your planning. Execute your marketing strategies. Execute your process improvement projects. There will be time to perfect them as you go along. But when your competitors finally get around to executing their “perfect” plans – you will be that many steps ahead of the game.

Difficult times are opportunities. Many will struggle, some will fail, but for those who are ready and execute – you can leverage these times to make up ground quickly.

My advice: Don’t listen to the news. Follow your own plan and make things happen.

Technical Terms Confusing? Here’s An Explanation!

As a technician for over 20 years, I have heard a variety of terms being thrown around and I am sure a lot of these are terms you have heard at one time or another and never knew the true meaning of the word. I thought that a list of terms most people have heard along with the definitions would help to understand the variety of things that can happen to a computer, but hopefully not yours.

Hang: A totally unresponsive computer is said to be hung, or hanged. You could also use the term frozen, though hang is the accepted term used by computer nerds for generations.

This very thing happened to me just the other day. I was home on my personal PC and I needed to view a webinar on Windows Server 2008. I got ready for the webinar and when the webinar started my computer just froze. I checked with a co-worker to make sure there was nothing wrong with the website. I had to reboot my computer and when I did I was able to view the webinar. My computer had totally hung. But once the PC came back up I discovered I had a glitch…

Glitch: Whenever the computer does something strange or unexpected or behaves in a manner inconsistent with normal operation, that’s a glitch. Glitches happen to everyone.

In this case, my sound did not work. As far as I knew it was working. The sound may have not been working for weeks but you notice it missing only when you otherwise would expect it. Such is the agony of the glitch. When I asked my wife if she had any problems with the computer I got the classic “Oh yeah, I meant to tell you I think the sound is out.” Often, you fail to notice a glitch unless it does something that directly affects what you’re doing.

Bug: A bug is an error in a computer program. Despite the efforts of the best programmers, most computer software is riddled with bugs. Bugs are what cause computer glitches. Bad bugs can cause a computer to hang or crash.

Note that most of the worst bugs happen when you mix two programs together and they interact in some new and unexpected way. The term comes from the early days of computing, when a real bug (a moth) got stuck in the circuitry.

Crash: Crash is another term for a dead computer — specifically, what happens to a hard drive when it ceases operation. A crash is typically more sensational than a hang.

Remember that a hang is a freeze. A crash is typically accompanied by spectacular warning messages or weird behavior (and may indicate more than just a dying hard drive). In fact, a crashed computer may still be teasingly functional. Only the foolhardy continue to use a crashed computer.

If you have been experiencing any of the bugs, glitches, hangs or crashes make sure to visit a professional at Tech Experts as soon as possible so we can do our best to protect your vital information from disappearing forever. You can reach us at (734) 457-5000.

Slowdown Means It’s Time To Boost Productivity

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

I attended an industry summit last month in Orlando, Florida, sponsored by the company that develops the software we use to run our business. Over 750 of the computer industry’s top service providers all converged in Downtown Disney for two days of training, sharing of best practices and panel discussions on the future of the computer service business.

Not surprisingly, a frequent topic of discussion among the attendees was the economy. While I know companies and people are struggling, I think in large part the media builds up the hype and frenzy to the point of near mass hysteria. “Bad news sells papers,” as they say.

Being involved in these discussions at the summit did drive home the point that we need to be the trusted business advisor for our clients. This means we need to do more than fix your computers – we need to help you maximize your technology investment, reduce costs and lower overhead. You don’t want computers – you want what the computers can do for you.

This has never been more important than right now, as we’re watching the economy rise and fall like a roller coaster.

This idea won’t be popular with your employees, but one of the areas where we can help you make an immediate impact on your bottom line is by increasing productivity. The Internet has become a way of life for nearly everyone – and almost every staff person has Internet access right at their desktops.

If you have a medium sized company with 10 regular, work at their desk type employees. Let’s assume, too, that each person makes $20 per hour after taxes and benefits. If each employee wastes just five minutes per day on the Internet, your annual waste is over $4,300. If they spend 15 personal minutes per day on the Internet, the annual cost is more than $13,000. An hour per day? The cost skyrockets to more than $50,000 per year.

There are plenty of options available to limit and monitor Internet usage at your company, and I’d encourage you to implement something immediately. There are some options that won’t cost you anything more than an hour of one of our consultant’s time.

If you know that employees are spending time on Myspace, for example, we can block access to that website. Or, you can make Myspace a hot monitoring term, and start recording a screen shot every second while an employee is on that site.

We also have the ability to block any external sites at the firewall level, so there’s no need to monitor employee’s computers. With a firewall, we can deny and allow sites based on their category (research sites are allowed, while lingerie sites aren’t). Call me at the office (734-457-5000) and I’ll be happy to discuss options with you.

If you’re concerned about violating employee privacy, here’s a little secret I’ll let you in on: The good employees don’t care. And secretly, they’re going to be happy you’re cracking down on the slackers.

Tips For Handling, Storing, & Disposing Of Confidential Documents

In the past 10 years, over 10,000 new regulations have been placed on the books by local, state and federal agencies pertaining to the handling, storage, and disposal of confidential client, patient, and employee documents.

A few examples are:

  • SEC Rule 17a-4 Electronic Storage of Broker Dealer Records Graham-Leach-Bliley Act
  • Financial Services Modernization Act
  • Sarbanes-Oxley Act
  • DOD 5015.2 Department of Defense
  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
  • Fair Labor Standards Act
  • Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Act
  • Payment Card Industry Data Security (PCI DSS)

No matter how small your business is, you are surely going to be affected by one or more of these new government regulations. Naturally some industries are more regulated, such as financial or medical, but all companies that hold information such as employee social security numbers, credit cards, financial statements (credit applications, bank statements, order forms) fall under these new regulations.

While we cannot cover every single aspect of protecting your company, here are a few tips that will go a long way in making sure you don’t end up fined, sued, or with a bad reputation for not securing your clients information:

Seek professional help. If you think you are holding confidential information that should be secured, ask a qualified attorney who specializes in data confidentiality in your industry about what you must do to meet new government regulations.

Shred all documents that contain confidential information. A good shredder should do a cross cut or diamond cut versus a simple strip shredder to make it more difficult for someone to piece together a shredded document.

If you have to keep a copy of contracts or other documents that contain confidential information, contact a high-security document storage facility like Iron Mountain (ironmountain.com) and they will store your documents in a high-security location.

Keep a fire-proof safe with a lock and key for employee documents you need to keep onsite.

Make sure your offsite backups have 32-bit encryption (ask your provider).

Also make sure the facility where the information is stored is under lock and key with security camera and access-controlled security.

Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Building a Phenomenally Successful Business

Sam Walton, the founder of the Wal-Mart chain, had 10 rules for building a business that he adamantly believed in. According to the Wal-Mart website, the following are the principles that have enabled the company to experience more than 40 years of outrageous success:

1. Commit to your business. You have to believe in it more than anyone else. You have to have passion. Love your work and do it the best you can every day.

2. Share your profits with all your associates and treat them as partners. This will make the people who work for you perform beyond your wildest expectations. Behave as a servant leader.

3. Motivate your partners. You have to constantly think of new ways to motivate your partners.

4. Communicate everything you possibly can to your associates. The more they understand, the more they’ll care.

5. Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

6. Celebrate your success. Have fun. Find humor in your failures. Loosen up.

7. Listen to everyone in your company. And more important, try to get them talking. The ones who really talk to the customers are the ones who really know what’s going on.

8. Exceed your customers’ expectations. Give them what they want–then give ’em a little more.

9. Control your expenses better than your competitors. You can survive a lot of mistakes if you’re efficient.

10. Swim upstream. Ignore the conventional wisdom; find your niche by going another direction.

Three easy Steps to get Seven Years of Hassle Free Service From Your Laser Printer

Printers – the necessary evil of every office. From paper jams and error messages, to problems like smearing, misfeeds, and ghosting, printers can really make your blood pressure rise.

Plus, it’s easy to sink thousands of dollars into maintenance and repairs. If you want to avoid common printer problems AND save yourself a small fortune on replacements and repairs, follow these 3 easy steps:

Keep It Clean
There is no faster way to gunk up a laser printer and cause printing problems than by letting it get dirty.

On a monthly basis, use compressed air to blow out the inside of the printer. Remove the toner cartridge for better access, and don’t forget to do the back if it is accessible. It also helps to take a vacuum to the outside. If you print labels or use any other type of specialty media like transparencies, use rubbing alcohol to clean the rollers inside the printer.

Do Your Maintenance
You can almost infinitely extend your printers lifespan by doing the regular maintenance suggested by the manufacturer.

This includes replacing rollers, filters, and occasionally replacing the fuser (the printer’s internal furnace.) Here’s a little money-saving secret: you only need to do this type of maintenance at 1.5 to 2 times the manufacturer’s usage recommendation.

So, if the manufacturer says to replace rollers every 100,000 pages, you really only need to do so every 150,000 to 200,000 pages.

Use a Surge Protector
Nothing will send your printer to the bone yard faster than an electrical surge caused by lightning or other issues on the power grid.

When internal components are fried, it is often cheaper to buy a new printer than it is to fix the existing one. It is easy to protect yourself with a $25 surge protector. DO NOT plug a laser printer into a UPS or other battery backup system. The printer’s power draw is too much for a battery to handle.

What To Do When Things go Technically Wrong

It’s amazing how many things can go wrong with your computer; bad drivers, hardware malfunctions, viruses, software glitches, spyware… and this is only the beginning. Computer problems always seem to happen at the most inconvenient times and can leave you stranded for hours, even days without a computer. However, vendor “help desk” support can be frustrating and in some cases, expensive.

The next time you have a computer problem, here are six simple things you can do to try and resolve the problem yourself or to at least prepare and get the most out of your help desk support.

1. Check your connections. This may sound obvious, but check all the cables to make sure they are plugged in securely. Don’t ignore this step because USB, printer, and serial cables have a way of working themselves loose and causing problems.

2. Reboot. Windows sometimes gets into a state of confusion or overload and locks up. You can clear the memory and set things straight by simply rebooting your system. Similarly, if you’re having a problem connecting to the Internet, try rebooting your cable/DSL modem and router by unplugging them for 15 seconds to reset them.

However, this isn’t something you should have to do often. If you find yourself rebooting your router once a day, the problem is a bit deeper. If you still can’t resolve the problem yourself, then here are a few more steps to take before calling support that will save a lot of time and get your problem resolved quicker…

3. Try to narrow down the problem as much as possible. Identifying what went wrong is 90% of the journey to the solution. Try to isolate when and where the problem happened and note the last thing you installed, changed, or plugged in to your computer. You’ll also want to narrow down the error message as much as possible.

For example, if you discover your printer isn’t working from Word, try to print from another application.

Maybe you can print when you first boot up, but everything seems to go haywire after you scan a document. Does the problem occur all the time or only after the machine has been running for a while? Does the problem repeat itself or is it only occasional? Observing what situations lead up to a problem can be a great help in determining what is causing it.

4. Access crash logs. If you are using a Microsoft operating system, you can access an application called Dr. Watson that will report information about your memory and configuration to a crash log file.

In Windows XP, the default location is C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\ Dr Watson. The crash log is a text file called Drwtsn32.log, which can be read in Notepad or sent via e-mail to a tech-support person.

5. Know your system. When you talk to a support technician on the phone, they are going to want to know what specific hardware, operating system, and software you’re using.

To save time, know the make and model numbers for all your hardware. You can access CPU and memory info by selecting Control Panel | System. Drill down from here into Hardware | Device Manager for information about other devices such as your sound and graphics cards.

Write down new software, no matter how small or insignificant, that you’ve downloaded and installed lately, including upgrades, screen savers, emoticon software, and web browser updates. It can also help to jot down any services running in the background.

To access a list of what is running on your Windows XP system, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and select Task Manager. You can also get very detailed info from Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | System Information.

6. Back up your data. Before you start following directions over the phone from a support technician or tearing your system apart to fix it yourself, make sure you have a backup of all your important documents, e-mail, and other data.

Although many fixes will be as simple as downloading a new driver, you’ll be glad you have a backup if you find yourself reinstalling the operating system. You should also have your original CDs around in case you need to reinstall applications.

The ExpertsMobile: “What the heck is it?!”

 

What the heck is it?! Boy, do we get that question a lot!

The “ExpertsMobile” is a 2008 Smart fortwo. It is a two seat (“for two,” get it?!) gasoline-powered car manufactured by Smart, a division of Daimler. That’s right, it is a 100% gasoline engine, not electric. We’re averaging about 40 miles per gallon driving around town.

The fortwo received four out of five stars in front impact crash tests, and five out of five stars in side-impact crash tests, so it is very safe! The body panels are made out of 100% recyclable materials. And it has a lot more space for transporting sick computers than you might think!

We like the Smart for a couple of reasons, but most importantly, it is smart for the environment, and smart for our company, since it saves us so much money on gasoline and maintenance. Plus, it’s fun to drive!

The Smart is like our philosophy in supporting small business computer networks: The latest appropriate technology, delivered in an efficient and cost effective way.

If you’d like to learn more about the Tech Experts Smart car, visit: www.SmartComputerGuys.com.

For more information about Smart cars, visit www.smartusa.com.

 

Is Your Company Getting Slandered Online?

New “Online Identity Managers” Are Becoming A Must For Business Owners Who Need To Keep Their Online Reputation Clean…

A recent front-page story in the Washington Post brought to light a fast-growing trend in today’s digital world: online identity management.

According to the article, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, was getting slandered online after one of her clients turned on her, calling her “a con and a fraud,” and accusing her of taking kickbacks and destroying people’s lives. Negative comments were being posted on online bulletin boards, forums, and threatening videos were posted up on YouTube for the world to see.

Even though Scheff sued for defamation and won an $11.3 million verdict, the attacks worsened. To resolve this situation, Scheff was forced to hire ReputationDefender, a PR firm that cleaned up her reputation online.

While the costs for hiring this firm were steep (reputation management firms charge $15,000 to $100,000 for their services), the cost of her time, litigation and reputation make their fees seem like a drop in the bucket.

So what should you do if you are an average Joe small business with limited resources? Fortunately, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and you can easily monitor your image online for free with a few simple steps.

First, the easiest way to check your online reputation is to Google your name or the name of your company and see what appears. Next, set up a Google Alert on your name and your company name. You’ll be alerted by e-mail whenever you or your organization has been mentioned in a blog, by the media, or in an online forum.

Next, make sure your website and your company is coming up first in search engines. If you own the top positions online, negative media may not show up on the first listing when your name is Googled.

To do this, create a profile of your expertise using social bookmarking tools and news aggregators such as del.icio.us and Newsvine.

Contribute to online forums and write articles for user-generated content sites such as Squidoo. You can even create book and product reviews at Amazon.com to help establish your authority on a particular topic or subject matter.

You should also create a blog for yourself and your company, and then link that to your main web site. Tech Experts can help you set up a blog using your existing domain name. Post to your blog frequently and make sure your posts are key-word relevant.

Other obvious ways to put a positive spin online about your company is to create content pages on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.

Finally, be very careful about posting any incriminating evidence about you or your company or sending e-mails with incriminating information, tasteless jokes, or messages that could easily be misconstrued.

You don’t want a search on your name to bring up pictures of you in compromising situations or sexist, racist, or off-color jokes you thought were only being sent to your friends. If you wouldn’t want it posted to a billboard, don’t post it or send it via e-mail.