Doctors: Take These Words to Heart

By Victoria Cayce


Linda was feeling bad. Really bad. She had been overly tired for a week, but since her kids had just gotten over a bug they picked up at school she assumed that the nausea and fatigue were related and went back to plowing through her busy day. Then her upper back began to ache. The dull pain in her chest was making it hard to breathe and she was sweating. She ignored it and kept on going. Three hours later, Linda was dead at the age of 45.


Remember back in high school when your teacher was telling you that knowing how to diagram a sentence would be important later in life? While a dangling participle is not a likely cause of death, she may have been on to something. Good communication, or the lack of it, is directly linked to the outcomes of cardiac patient care. And that is a matter of life and death.

In the story above, the hypothetical Linda ignores her symptoms because she simply doesn’t know that heart attacks often present differently in females than they do in males. If she had been aware, she would have been more likely to seek emergency treatment that might have saved her life. Sadly, the story of Linda plays out in real life every day.

Leading Cause of Death in Womenbroken_heart-1503 (1)

While more and more people have become aware of the dangers of breast cancer and the need for self-examination, many more women are completely uninformed about their heart health. The case for informing women of the dangers of breast cancer is laudable; however, these same women are at greater risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke. According to the Center for Disease Control 1 in 31 women die from some form of cancer each year while one in every four women die from heart disease. The key to improving these numbers is at the local level; healthcare professionals are on the front lines and must do a better job of educating their patients about the risks and symptoms of heart disease in women.

Perceptions are Everything

Studies have shown that the public has a perception that heart attacks happen more frequently in men. The great disconnect for women is not helped by the media, which tends to portray the dramatic “Hollywood heart attack” of someone (often a male) who is gripping their chest before they collapse. In reality, many women experience either no symptoms or a dull pain or discomfort that may radiate to the throat, arm, or jaw.

Medical providers can do a lot to break this myth by simply talking to their patients about the differences and making information more accessible for them. For example, doctors could start by adding a few questions to the forms that new patients fill out regarding their family history of heart disease. They would follow up by briefly explaining the warning signs for female patients.  The questionnaire might include targeted keywords related to the symptoms such as:

  • Have you been feeling excessively tired in the last few weeks?
  • Have you experienced pain in your neck, back or jaw?
  • Have you been having stomach pain?
  • Have you been having chest discomfort or pain?

When patients leave, a nurse, technician, or a member of the office staff could hand them a packet that contains small laminated poster with a magnetized back that can hang on a refrigerator door. Medical offices can also display colorful informational posters that clearly explain things that female patients and their families should know including:

  • How minutes count when someone is having a heart attack
  • How they should give someone with the symptoms of a heart attack an aspirin
  • The differences in male and female heart symptoms

Another reason that female patients tend to press on and ignore heart related symptoms is that they do not feel emotionally comfortable seeking medical care. They may also regard their own symptoms as trivial. Doctors and nurses need to create an environment in which female patients especially feel comfortable reporting their symptoms. To address this issue, medical providers must create an atmosphere of trust.

Open Doors Save Lives

For instance, when discussing issues related to cardiac care, physicians and their staff need to stress the fact that they have an open door policy, and that symptoms should never, ever be ignored. Explaining that it is OK to seek medical care (and that they will not be dismissed out of hand) will go a long way in removing the emotional barriers to care and alleviating fears of being dismissed or labeled a hypochondriac.

Unfortunately, the fear of being labeled may not be that far off of the mark as a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine involving more than 10,000 cardiac patients (48% were women) demonstrated that females under the age of 55 were seven times more likely to be turned away than male patients while they were actually experiencing a heart attack. The most common misdiagnosis assigned was listed as “anxiety.”

Women Say it Differently

In part, this problem may be related to the fact that women often use different verbal clues to express their symptoms. For instance, female patients are much more likely to complain of “discomfort” while male patients use the word “pain.” When combined with the more subtle symptoms of heart attacks in women, this tendency can easily lead to a misdiagnosis.

Furthermore, in an American Medical Association study that included more than one million patients, females were found to be twice as likely to die while hospitalized when their symptoms (including changes in an EKG) were not expressed in the classic way that males do when experiencing in a heart attack.

Communication is therefore even more critical to providing appropriate care to female patients. Medical providers must go beyond the basics and employ active listening that allow for the inherent differences of male versus female speech patterns and word usage. They must then apply more aggressive treatment strategies when a heart attack is suspected. In other words, they must be willing to dig deeper when females present with less specific and immediate heart related symptoms.

Communicating in a Social World

Marketing campaigns have had a significant impact on breast cancer awareness. The Susan G Komen Foundation, for instance, uses social media, blogs, touching real-life stories and marathons to help raise funds and awareness. Doctors and nurses can use the same approaches to educate women about heart attack symptoms. They can get their message on social media. They can write engaging blog posts with relatable stories and critical information about heart attack symptoms in men and women.  Their posts can include valuable resources, too, including tools for heart health such as the Heart Attack Risk Calculator.

Local health care providers also can incorporate national awareness campaigns into their grassroots efforts. The American Heart Association has created a short film to educate women called Just a Little Heart Attack that is very sharable and could be embedded in social media. Additionally, medical personnel can spread information by holding heart health awareness events that offer free cholesterol checks and heart health screenings. Volunteers could hand out:

  • Red bracelets ( The American Heart Association has designated red as the color for heart awareness)
  • T-shirts with heart health slogans and information
  • Red balloons
  • Memorabilia such as cups, magnets and bumper stickers aimed at increasing awareness

Doctors and hospitals also can team up with professional writers and marketers to create slogans and messages that the public can understand and respond to. They can connect with local news stations to get the word out about events.

Anyone working in a busy practice understands that time is extremely limited. But bolstering medical practice’s heart attack awareness efforts with a social medial campaign, as well as a blog aimed at a lay audience, gives you the ability to get your critical message across to far more people. The point is to get the word out as often and as clearly as possible, and ultimately, to save lives.

Six Tips for Repurposing Your Copy

By Tom Schek


Creating a steady stream of informative, engaging materials to fuel a content marketing program takes a great deal of time and effort. However, you can get more out of that resource investment by repurposing content.


Some observers might consider that “cheating,” and if you simply swap out a few words or rewrite a few sentences and call the piece “new,” that characterization seems accurate. However, with a little creativity and effort, you can find many legitimate ways to extend the life, and the value, of your content.

  1. Refreshed and Ready


    Business changes rapidly. A piece you wrote a few years back may now seem outdated. Don’t pull it from your content inventory. Instead, update your copy and include a new introduction explaining what has transpired since you created the original item. For example, you can add details on new features to a product review, the latest best practices to a previous list, updated stats to a case study, etc. Now you have a piece that provides both current information and a fascinating look back, and you have produced it in a fraction of the time required to develop the original.


  2. Divide and Conquer

    White papers, case studies and other long-form content typically contain elements that can be used as standalone pieces or combined with others. Testimonials from a case study can find a broader audience when prominently displayed on your website. Flowcharts, photos and other visual elements can be incorporated into an infographic. There may be ideas or statements in text passages that would work well as the basis of a blog post.

  3. Compelling Compilations

    The flip side of the divide and conquer approach is to assemble a larger work out of multiple small ones. As the saying goes, you will often find that the whole is greater (i.e. more impactful) than the sum of its parts. Look for concepts that are repeated in the content you produce and use them as a foundation for combining previously separate pieces.

  4. A Tip of the Hat

    Mentioning that some of the information in a new piece originated in an older one serves as a great way to pull the original item back into the spotlight, giving it new life.

  5. On Second Thought

    In the same way that business practices and technology change, your perspective on a topic around which you previously created materials might evolve as well. Explaining your change of heart not only lets you blow the dust off an old piece, it earns you points for being honest.

  6. Changing Channels

    Every few years, a new social media platform springs up – Instagram and SlideShare are a few relatively recent examples. Often, items you created in some other format would be a perfect fit for the new medium with only a small amount of “retrofitting.”

    Your marketing content, like any valuable asset your company possesses, should be utilized to its fullest. While you don’t want to overuse your materials, making pieces available to new audiences in new ways is not only acceptable, it’s smart business.

Crafting Tourism Industry Content

By Jennifer Babisak


The award-winning television drama “Mad Men” fed viewers much more than a weekly dose of suspense and eye-candy. Though the focus sometimes drifted more to Don Draper’s sexcapades than his creative mind, the show still gave an intriguing peek into the inner workings of an advertising agency.


The Art of Emotional Appeal

The tourism industry would do well to pay attention to some of the marketing strategies that Sterling Cooper Draper Price employed during the show’s seven seasons. For instance, Don was a master of crafting emotional appeal. “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he said of a Kodak slide projector, “It’s called a carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”

The efficacy of such emotional appeal applies to much more than slide projectors. Emotive appeals work particularly well in the tourism industry, where destinations have spun their wheels with straightforward marketing techniques, targeting consumers’ rational purchasing-power, for far too long.

Vacation Time and Stress-Management

Americans have a track-record of exceedingly poor stress management. In addition to financial and health stressors, the widespread use of smartphones has brought twenty-four hour workplace connectivity and an unending barrage of horrific news headlines. You would think a chronic stressful lifestyle would send employees running for the hills come vacation time. But a recent Harris Interactive survey presented the startling finding that American employees only use 51% of their eligible paid vacation time and paid time off.

Yes, you read that correctly. Chronically stressed employees are leaving vacation time sitting on the shelf. They want vacations, need vacations, and have the means to take vacations. All that lacks is an effective tourism industry appeal, motivating enough to cause Americans to break through their fog of stress and take the action of booking a vacation.

And guess what? Bulleted lists reciting a destination’s most recent million-dollar renovations won’t spur the apathetic consumer to action. What these potential tourists- ripe for the persuading- need is carefully constructed marketing content brimming with emotional appeal.

Emotional Content Standouts

Major destinations are waking up to the value of using emotional appeal in marketing campaigns. Most notably, Las Vegas employed the incredibly successful tagline, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” refining its image as a hedonistic escape from the boundaries of daily life.

vegas2And the longest running tourism campaign in history, “Virginia is for Lovers,” began back in 1969. In the ensuing years, Virginia has capitalized on the marketing value of those words- posturing itself as a romantic getaway filled with warmth and charm.
But emotive content goes beyond concise taglines. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau recently launched a campaign to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The CVB sent out an emotionally-charged series of e-mails, thanking travel industry professionals for their coverage of the city and highlighting its advances in the decade since Katrina.

The president of the CVB kicked off the campaign with an e-mail containing this message: , “So as we look back at what happened here 10 years ago, we want to give thanks to all of you who took us in when we had no place to go, helped us tell our story when we had no voice, helped us rebuild our homes and our city from ruin, celebrated our victories, showcased to the world what makes our city so special, and those of you who simply came to be our guests as we put the pieces back together. In the next nine days leading up to the 10th anniversary of Katrina, we will be sending you a short video, showcasing some of the improved aspects of New Orleans.”

Tugs at the heartstrings, right? And it creates, or renews, an emotional attachment to the city, drawing visitors in more than a simple list of “improved aspects” ever could. Note in his message where he thanks writers who “helped us tell our story.” That’s the goal of effective emotionally driven tourism content– telling the unique story of a destination.

Finding the Right Words

So how do you find the magical, emotive words that will lure droves of tourists to your destination? It’s actually a combination of careful research- discovering where your intended audience and your unique offerings intersect- along with meticulously crafted written content:

  • Evaluate where your revenue lags. Do you need to boost business during the week or on weekends? During peak times or off-season? Having a concrete goal in mind will help you focus on the proper audience.
  • Pinpoint your ideal tourist. Based on your revenue assessment, you should know whether you’re looking to attract more mid-week business travelers, family weekenders, or retired snowbirds. Familiarize yourself with the profile of your intended audience.
  • Discover the desires of your audience. What motivates these people to travel? Are they seeking escape, adventure, serenity, or relaxation? Hone in on a specific emotional motivation.
  • Review the offerings of your destination, searching for particular experiences that will appeal to your audience’s emotions. You don’t have to highlight your destination’s entire range- specific and well-defined focus on an emotionally appealing experience is in order.
  • Carefully craft your content, highlighting your chosen experiences in a fashion likely to appeal to your chosen audience. Take care to tailor your writing style to the vernacular of your audience. Genteel retirees aren’t likely to respond well to copy littered with hipster slang, while millennials magnetize to key-words tailored to their generation.
  • Maintain consistency across all modes of communication. Don’t cast your destination in one light on Facebook while presenting a different image in print brochures. Find your identity, articulate it well, and stay true to your message.

Such a strategy holds great potential for payoff. After all, the travel and tourism industry has an annual economic impact of around $6.5 trillion U.S. dollars, worldwide. And a Choice Hotels International survey found that Americans plan to spend 8% more on leisure travel and 5% more per trip in 2015 than they did the previous year.

With carefully-crafted, emotionally-driven content, you can ensure that a good chunk of those $6.5 trillion dollars lands squarely on your destination’s doorstep.

Ghostwriter, Publisher Insights

By Katherine Adams

It’s not easy to build a reputation in the field of ghostwriting. After all, when a ghostwriter authors books, articles, reports, and the like, the work is officially credited to another person. Still, Wintress Odom, owner of The Writers For Hire, manages to lead one of the most sought-after teams of ghostwriters in Houston — and the U.S.

Odom recently provided a glimpse into the world of ghostwriting during an interview on “The Price of Business,” aired on Business Talk Radio 1110 AM KTEK. (Check out the interview below.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko-J5SvkOQQ

Odom’s interviewer, guest presenter Dino Price, is the managing director of Houston-based John M. Hardy Publishing. Both had stories to share.

The Writers For Hire is a ghostwriting service that offers a business everything it could need in terms of writing services,” Odom told Price. “That includes writing marketing copy, websites, brochures, white papers, and full-length books. Our favorites are autobiographies. We love to tell stories and family histories.”

Wintress Odom Wintress OdomPrice said that his publishing company also has a special interest in Texas non-fiction stories and autobiographies. “We are losing our history,” he said. “There’s not enough people out there trying to put history back on paper. Wintress is filling in that niche, and I’m trying to publish as many of those stories about family histories here in Texas as I can.”

“The work The Writers For Hire does in ghostwriting books tends to fall into multiple categories,” Odom explained.

“We work with working or retired business executives to publish books on their area of expertise, like finance, hedge funds, or startups.”

The Writers For Hire has also ghostwritten a true crime book, Odom added. “That really wasn’t really a business book, but it was still really fun.

“Another project we’ve got is about the impact of the American shale revolution in the oil and gas industry.”

Additional topics include self-help and how-to books with experts in medicine or relationships. “And then, of course, we have our incredible autobiographical stories, which we’re honored to tell,” Odom said.

Dino Price width= Dino PriceShe said she believes the success of The Writers For Hire could be attributed to customer service. “It’s one thing to be a great writer, but to be a great ghostwriter, you also have to work well with clients,” she said. “Great writing is the result of a collaborative effort. It has to be their voice. We are just the medium.”

Odom said that because of the nature of The Writers For Hire’s services, she can’t get too specific about the company’s projects.

Price said that he’s in the midst of putting together a coalition of publishers with the goal of achieving wider distribution for their novels. “We’re going to call it the Texas Publishers’ Coalition, and we’re in negotiations with Baker & Taylor, Simon and Schuster, and Hachette,” he said.

For more information about The Writers For Hire, visit www.thewritersforhire.com or follow the company on Facebook or Twitter.

For more information about John Hardy Publishing, visit www.johnhardypublishing.com or follow it on Facebook or Twitter.