Hearing Health & Technology Matters

Nick Fitzgerald has served as HHTM’s Chief Marketing Officer for the past 3 years. He is the President and Owner of AuDSEO, a full service digital marketing agency. With over 15 years of digital marketing experience, Nick is a highly data-driven marketer, with expertise in search engine optimization, digital analytics and forensics, social media, digital advertising, and web development. He has been involved in the construction and optimization of nearly 1,000 web presences, including some of the largest Fortune 500 companies.

Overheard on the Orient Express: A mystery (Part 1 of 2)

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

By Robert Sweetow Having a hearing loss is no joke. But having a sense of humor about hearing loss is often very helpful. Similarly, being able to laugh about our profession can provide relief from what is sometimes an overwhelming, albeit satisfying, occupation. Recently, the editors of hearinghealthmatters.org invited me to contribute to their blog. Given the plethora of serious

Featured image for “Die Hard: Unraveling HearUSA, part 5”

Die Hard: Unraveling HearUSA, part 5

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

Those of you attempting to follow this series may have concluded what I have about HEARx: like Dracula, it just won’t die! As one insider put it, “It was a publicly traded company but most of the stock was not owned by the public. They always showed a loss and just kept issuing more and more shares” {{1}}[[1]]Support for this view comes from HEARx itself:

Closed Captioning; Not just for TVs

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

What type of information do we share with our patients (or clients) about hearing in public places. We have touched on looping, but how much “in the know” are we about Closed Captioning? Yes, most all TVs have this option, but more theaters and play houses are offering this option for the Hard of Hearing. This is a link for

Featured image for “Down Boy, Sit, Stay! Unraveling HearUSA, part 4”

Down Boy, Sit, Stay! Unraveling HearUSA, part 4

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

As last week’s post wound down, HEARx was hurtling toward 200 retail “hearing aid stores,” 14% US marketshare, and multimillion dollar profitability by 1991. They didn’t make it. By 1995, the company was a penny stock (NASDAQ Bulletin Board OTC: EARS) with only 20% of the stores projected for 5 years earlier. HEARx wasn’t nationwide and it wasn’t profitable, although top management continued to pull down

Why I Blog

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

Most of the articles that appear in the Hearing Views section are contributed by people from outside the Hearing Health Matters family. But, from time to time, editors of other areas of this blog are invited to opine in this space on matters of interest to them and, we hope, to our readers. This week, two of our regular bloggers

Why I Blog

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

By David H. Kirkwood After editing and writing for newspapers and magazines for the past 35 years or so, what appealed to me most about blogging was the complete change of pace that it offered. Don’t get me wrong. I still believe that printed publications have some unique virtues. And, while they face enormous challenges, I am convinced that some

Options for Hiring the Right Person: Guest Blog

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

Hello! For this week, I have my first Guest Blogger! George Mathis has been in the industry for many years and we have had a great working relationship for 16 of those. When I moved to Arizona in 1995 I was in his territory with the manufacturer he worked with. I was also only a few years out of Graduate

Featured image for “Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Unraveling HearUSA, part 3”

Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Unraveling HearUSA, part 3

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

Part 2 of this series looked at the original HEARx vision in which ENT Medical Directors, guided by a 7-member Medical Advisory Board, were set to legitimize audiology within the healthcare industry and among consumers. Today’s post describes the strategies for developing and underwriting this endeavor, as described in the original HEARx Marketing Plan{{1}}[[1]]HEARx Marketing Plan, internal document, 1986[[1]]. All quotes in this post

The Joy of a Good Attitude

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

I was at my Woman’s Networking group retreat this past weekend. We were discussing balance in our lives. It was a great exercise to examine what brings me joy and how much time I spend on these activities. There are things about my career that give me joy, but especially my family. So my focus was how to make the

The V’s of Satisfaction

Hearing Health & Technology Matters

Do you track your patient encounters? How do you measure success? If we look at the latest research from the Better Hearing Institute patients are more satisfied with fewer visits with a structured follow up that includes verification and validation. There was an article by Sergei Kochkin ( https://www.betterhearing.org/pdfs/M8_Verification_Validation_Study.pdf) in The Hearing Review recently to support this. In our offices