Lee Brice: Garth Brooks is my hero | Kurt's Country
Neil A. Carousso produces NewsNation original “Kurt’s Country” – a celebration of country music and a slice of Americana with host Kurt Bardella.
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The New Age Word-of-Mouth Marketing
By Joe Connolly and Neil A. Carousso
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Word-of-mouth can still be the most effective marketing for businesses.
Long Island Spine Specialists, P.C. discovered this when they were forced to find new patients on their own. The rapid consolidation of hospitals and physicians in recent years have left non-affiliated practices to develop their own marketing.
“Our referral patterns dried up in terms of private practice doctors,” said Dr. Thomas Dowling, founding partner of Long Island Spine Specialists. “I’d say less than 50 percent now of physicians are in private practice where the rest are employed and there’s some financial reward or incentive to stay in a system rather than refer outside a system.”
He told Joe Connolly on the WCBS Small Business Spotlight, sponsored by Dime Community Bank, that, like many businesses today, the practice uses reviews and client testimonials on its website to find new patients.
“What our practice has now noted is that word-of-mouth and your reputation now is more of how we get patients than actual physician referral; although, those are still out there as well,” said Dr. Dowling.
Long Island Spine Specialists keeps its servers in-house and has a full-time IT staff to manage its website security.
Dr. Dowling has been in practice for more than 30 years. Since then, the health care industry and his field of medicine has changed drastically.
“When I started, there was very little technology available in terms of instrumentation,” he said, noting there were few advancements between the 1960s and 1980s when he earned his certifications.
The hallmark of any entrepreneur, Dr. Dowling saw an opportunity to help people where there was a void for both surgical and non-surgical solutions.
“There’s some modifications but very few back then and there was a lot of opportunity to develop better techniques for surgery,” he said.
Robotics and stem cell procedures are used more commonly to treat herniated discs with a shorter recovery time, according to the surgeon.
“The navigation, basically, like your car or GPS, (is) a guided way to enter the spine as we’ve gone from open surgery where we actually see the anatomy to going through minimally invasive through smaller incisions or percutaneously, meaning not even making a real incision, we need special interoperative guidance to help us make sure that we’re in the right spot,” said Dr. Dowling.
The spinal surgery industry today is booming. It’s valued at $9.35 billion, and by some economic forecasts, the industry will reach $13.8 billion by 2025.
Long Island Spine Specialists has a small piece of the pie with four locations across Nassau and Suffolk Counties. The practice is made up of a team of board-certified orthopedic surgeons who have sub-specialties in spine surgery. Dr. Dowling told WCBS 880, though, most of their patients can avoid surgery.
“We have a lot of patients who present with neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, hip pain, and sometimes, they’re doubly blessed. They have a shoulder problem then a neck problem, they have a back problem or hip problem, or really, their hip pain manifests itself as back pain and vice versa,” he said, continuing, “So, there are people I’ve seen who had hip replacements wondering why they never got better; it was really their back.”
Dr. Dowling said the field has grown as people incur back problems from poor posture and long hours hunched over a computer.
“The most common reason people go to the doctor is for a cold,” he said. “The second most common reason is for back pain.”
See more on marketing and running a medical practice on the Small Business Spotlight video above.
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Small Business Comeback Tour: Bagels by Jarrett
By Joe Connolly and Neil A. Carousso
WEST ORANGE, NJ (WCBS 880) – Jarrett Seltzer tapped into a “cult” following of bagel lovers.
Just before the pandemic, Seltzer started giving away his homemade bagels out of his home kitchen.
“I decided to make a dozen bagels and post (on Facebook) that I had them and give them out,” he said. “I said to everyone the rule is you get one bagel, you have to post a review about it and you have to pay it forward somehow in town.”
Seltzer told Joe Connolly on the WCBS Small Business Comeback Tour, sponsored by PSE&G, the response was overwhelming. He opened a pop-up shop where he continued to give away bagels to gain a following before opening his business about two years later in West Orange.
“We are absolutely continuing to grow by word of mouth,” he said, pointing to a fall surge in bagel sales.
Seltzer said growth accelerated when they were forced to do curbside only in the pandemic and discovered how they would separate themselves from other bagel shops. Bagels by Jarrett added sliders and fried chicken sandwiches with bagels, which became big hits among their regular customers.
“It’s almost this interesting cult of people that love food and I don’t put anything out that isn’t incredible,” he said.
Bagels by Jarrett is expanding its kitchen in January and will add dinner takeout service.
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INTERVIEW: Soledad O’Brien talks new HBO docuseries ‘Black and Missing’
By Lynda Lopez
Produced by Neil A. Carousso
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — The recent coverage of the Gabby Petito case grabbed headlines across the globe and also helped shine a light on other missing persons cases that have not received the same attention.
The Black and Missing Foundation works to bring awareness to missing persons of color and their activism caught the attention of Soledad O’Brien, who has now produced a four-part HBO documentary series titled, “Black and Missing.”
On this week’s 880 Weekly Rewind, anchor Lynda Lopez spoke to the award-winning documentarian and journalist about the series, which chronicles the work of the organization and follows sisters-in-law and Black and Missing Foundation founders Derrica and Natalie Wilson.
As Lopez reported, Derrica and Natalie Wilson are not just figureheads. They are on the ground doing the work helping families find their missing loved ones.
“This is their second jobs, this is not even their job. Derrica works in law enforcement, and that’s really what she was able to bring to the table — that she had this tremendous experience of law enforcement. Natalie works in PR, so she was able to sit with families and say, ‘Let me give you some of the scoop on how these things work so we can get publicity for you,'” O’Brien said. “Often they’re just a conduit between law enforcement, which some families in some communities just don’t trust, and the media, and the families themselves. I’m always blown away by the importance of the work they’re doing and also it’s a side gig. Like, it’s insane to me that this is a side job for them.”
The series has been three years in the making and recently debuted on HBO and HBO Max, where it is currently streaming.
“We decided that we would reach out and see because of the number of stories of missing white women over the years had gotten so much attention, and I was well aware that there were lots of stories about Black people and people of color, generally, that just never really got any traction and so we met with them,” O’Brien said. “About a couple of months before the doc aired, the story of Gabby Petito became the latest well-known case of a young White woman who had gone missing, and of course she was later found dead. And I remember her dad saying, I thought it was amazing, really at the worst moment of his life before they found her body, he said something like, to the media, ‘You should be looking for all people.’ Even he thought the attention was amazing on helping find what had happened to his daughter, but there were so many other people who also deserved the same kind of attention and so I do think the needle is beginning to move in people’s awareness of the issue.”
The series not only chronicles the work of the organization, but also highlights the disparities in the media coverage of white and Black missing persons and how the cases are handled by law enforcement.
“On the media side, I would love to see people really analyze why do we not think this story is important? I do think the media needs to figure out let’s have a conversation about bias and how we think about these stories,” O’Brien said. “I just hope that people really want to understand the issue and walk away recognizing how unfair it is. I knew that progress was being made when Gabby’s own father sort of put a plea out for covering other people. The number of people who were found while they were searching for Gabby, I think it was like eight people, it was insane and so it clearly is an indication that we have to search hard for everybody.”
Listen to The 880 Weekly Rewind podcast above to hear how the organization is fighting for equal coverage and treatment in the media and by law enforcement of missing persons of color and what needs to change.
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92nd Street Y Goes Global with Success of Virtual Events
By Joe Connolly and Neil A. Carousso
NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — This iconic New York cultural institution has amassed a worldwide following after making the digital pivot.
The 92nd Street Y drew 5 million viewers in all 50 states plus 200 countries for its various online programs in the last year. In a typical pre-pandemic year, about 300,000 people would walk through its Upper East Side doors.
“The trick was to increase interactivity to make sure that people felt that the person that they were watching was in some way responding to them,” said Seth Pinsky, CEO of 92nd Street Y. “The way I like to describe it is that we went from competing with YouTube with videos that talked ‘to’ our audience to eventually finding our own version of these videos by creating programming that spoke ‘with’ our audience and that really was, I think, the key to our success.”
On the WCBS Small Business Spotlight, sponsored by Dime Community Bank, Pinsky told Joe Connolly and Neil A. Carousso 92Y tried new ways of doing virtual programs until they discovered how to differentiate themselves from the steep competition.
“I don’t think that every production necessarily has to be top top quality,” he said. “I think really it’s the combination of a level of quality that’s high enough that it’s not distracting to people, but again, it’s those extra intangible elements like the creation of community that when added to that are what I think pull audiences in, and over time, keep them.”
The 92nd Street Y has a full slate of original programs, classes and performances. Some of them are now exclusively virtual for their global audience even though the center in Manhattan is back open after being shut down during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The idea of creating content and just giving it away was something that over the long-run, we realized, wouldn’t be sustainable. And so, in some cases, we started to put our programming behind a paywall, and, amazingly, what we found was that our audience was willing to pay for the content,” said Pinsky.
He told WCBS 880 that roughly 60 percent of the 92nd Street Y’s new paying virtual audience members are from outside the New York Metropolitan Area and live in all parts of the world.
“Suddenly we realized that we were no longer just a New York institution, we were truly a global institution,” Pinsky said.
See how to make virtual events better and engage new customers through quality digital content on the Small Business Spotlight video above.
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Small Business Comeback Tour: BrownMill Company
By Joe Connolly and Neil A. Carousso
NEWARK, NJ (WCBS 880) – This small business has created a local lifestyle brand and an experience in Downtown Newark.
Justis Pitt-Goodson told Joe Connolly business is “booming” at BrownMill Company since opening a retail location at 49 Halsey St. in June.
On the WCBS Small Business Comeback Tour, sponsored by PSE&G, Pitt-Goodson explained they had built their online brand over the last 12 years, but it was always a dream of his to have a brick-and-mortar store. He took advantage of lower rents during the COVID-19 pandemic and set up shop.
“The community came out and supported and it’s been up from there,” said Pitt-Goodson.
Connolly pointed out it seems the custom tailor has a local barbershop feel where customers come to hang out.
“People consider it a hub of creativity and a place of inspiration,” Pitt-Goodson said.
Part of that inspiration comes from within. The recent Rutgers University graduate is motivated by his father to pay success forward, so BrownMill Company was founded as a social enterprise.
The company co-sponsors Giving 1/10th – a community garden in Newark that aims to increase access to fresh and organic vegetables for local residents. BrownMill Company also hosts weekly basketball camps in Pitt-Goodson’s hometown of Piscataway.
