Those are just ways to describe an idea, not necessarily the idea itself. People do this to quickly convey their message or business; it's straight out of the excellent book Made to Stick.

Although it's probably one of the symptoms, it's not the most important one.

They don't share because of their EGOS.

Made to Stick looks great. Added to my wishlist, thanks.

* Atlas Shrugged (also good: The Fountainhead) by Ayn Rand

* Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

* Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Freedman

* The Plague by Albert Camus

https://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/14...

Also, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. This helped create more effective and compelling content. It's very high-level though.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman - taught me how to make better decisions

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath - improved my ability to persuade.

While it's focused on kids, you might find some additional ideas in this article: http://kidscreen.com/2013/08/12/marketing-to-kids-and-famili...

From that list, my favorite ones were:

The Four Steps to the Epiphany: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/827338560

Made to Stick: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/897777811

How to Measure Anything: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/698402984

The Non-Designer's Design Book: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1170518622

Masters of Doom: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/899580915

The Martian: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1136330196

The Mistborn Trilogy: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1388373037

Sticky ideas:

1. are simple
2. are unexpected
3. are concrete
4. are credible
5. elicit emotion
6. tell stories

(http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/)

Next, google "Linkbait titles" and spend a few hours reading the top 20 results or so.

Thanks for this!

Make your site worth talking about and you don't have to spend any money (at first).

Read "Made to Stick" (great book on the subject of sticky ideas).

Give it a shot, I am sure you will find something of value in it.

http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140...

- quite good so far (1/2 way through)

A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster

http://www.amazon.com/Room-View-Bantam-Classics/dp/055321323...

- not sure what I think of it yet (about 1/2 way through). Found some of the writing a bit opaque, where I'm not sure what he's trying to say.

Made to Stick is an excellent read on the subject of branding and marketing. http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/

I used to run a blog in 2008 and I got it to 6.5million page views before I quit it and I was featured in the book "Blogging Heroes" along with the founders of Lifehacker, Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Boing Boing.

My key strategy when I was growing my blog was to find existing communities that would like what I was writing and then build relationships with those communities.

Take a look at this experiment, it shows that what is self-evident to you may not be as self-evident to others.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/83l/overcoming_the_curse_of_knowledg...

"In 1990, Elizabeth Newton did a fascinating psychology experiment: She paired participants into teams of two: one tapper and one listener. The tappers picked one of 25 well-known songs and would tap out the rhythm on a table. Their partner - the designated listener - was asked to guess the song. How do you think they did?

Not well. Of the 120 songs tapped out on the table, the listeners only guessed 3 of them correctly - a measly 2.5 percent. But get this: before the listeners gave their answer, the tappers were asked to predict how likely their partner was to get it right. Their guess? Tappers thought their partners would get the song 50 percent of the time. You know, only overconfident by a factor of 20. What made the tappers so far off?

They lost perspective because they were "cursed" with the additional knowledge of the song title.Chip and Dan Heath use the story in their book Made to Stick to introduce the term:

    "The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping, they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult or us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.""

Never Split the Difference - some very practical negotiation strategies.

Mini Habits by Stephen Guise - short book but awesome method. I am still doing the one pushup habit since last March.

How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck by Steve Stockman - I wanted to improve my video production for my programming course for kids. I am still learning but this book has been a huge help.

The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara Minto - huge help with improving my written communication at my job.

The Coaching Habit by Michael Stanier - short book but huge help when your transitioning to managing people.

Made to Stick by Dan Heath - was a huge help in planning how I would teach elementary students last month about programming.

The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch - aside from application of Pareto principle, I took away the idea that books provide the best bang for your buck for knowledge density.

The 4 Hour Work Week - great inspiration to start your own thing.

The $100 Startup - like the 4HWW but with more details.

I've heard a lot of good things about Made To Stick though, so I think it's time to bump that up the list a little.

Thanks for sharing!

Nonfiction: "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The best book on how to communicate. The best part: the book is written in a way that its content sticks to your memory for a very long time thus proving what it preaches.

I've won several marketing competitions, an elevator pitch contest, and made countless connections with others, using ideas from this book.

If you are interested in these things, I highly recommend Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers [1]. It focuses on the SUCCESs framework:

S - Short

U - Unexpected

C - Credible

C - Concrete

E - Emotional

S - Stories

They elaborate in excellent detail on each of these ideas and the acronym that they coined is a perfect example.

In terms of building your own credibility, I suggest reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. [2] This book is instrumental in understanding the basic concepts that can have a material impact on your life. I think that Autobiography of Ben Franklin [3] teaches a few key lessons in the use of diffidence that harmonizes well with Carnegie's ideas.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...

[3] http://www.classicly.com/download-autobiography-of-benjamin-...

Telegram has been used to share some very bad COVID disinformation.

My father who is older and lives in Iran shared with me this video about how to treat COVID. It was produced really nicely in the Farsi (Persian) language.

Anyone who has ever read the book "Made to Stick" (highly recommended) would immediately that this video was designed to be a viral disinformation campaign.

The video started so credibility talking about the virus, the family of virus it belongs to, it talked about genetics similarities, etc. All seem very credible. Then it comes the disinformation gotcha:

To defeat COVID (with some beautiful inside the lungs animation ) talking about alveoli and how they function, when you are indoor you need to laugh deeply and very hard. This laughing hard gets rid of the virus, etc. etc.

Great idea, right? Seems like a way to exacerbate the spread of a deadly virus.

To me the quality of video made me think it was probably produce by a state or entity working for a state with budget.

If that is so I considered this incident as one of the first examples of using disinformation to commit genocide.

The problem with Telegram team working from the United Arab Emirates, it's unclear to me if it's being used to weaponize disinformation for evil means or not.
From what I have seen, I believe, Telegram is being misused and it needs to be removed from the App Store.

Books like Switch and Made to Stick now go first on my "new coders should read this book" list, and I dont expect that trend to stop.

I liked the book "Made to Stick" http://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick/ about how to clearly present your message. They have a very good summary designed for presentations called "Making Presentations That Stick". The authors will give it in exchange of subscribing for their mailing list: http://heathbrothers.com/resources/overview/ (it is in the bottom of the page)

Another good book I'd recommend is Hot Button Marketing by Barry Feig.

I've read quite a few others, but none that really jump out that would be a great read for someone who's not a marketing person.

Chip and Dan Heath's "Made To Stick" goes over how we remember stories naturally much better than data/information not in a narrative/story. For my part, I can't think of any non-fiction that could prompt curiosity and attention to detail like the Sherlock Holmes series, or the process of gaining self-mastery like Musashi.

You're right, that is the "million dollar question"! I wish I had an easy answer. All I can come up with so far is to go with your best judgment and iterate, iterate, iterate.

I mean, I could imagine doing some A/B testing and micro-benchmarking on a small scale, to get an idea of which message resonates best. But what I'm not convinced of, is whether or not the position that tests well on a micro level, will still hold up on a broader level.

Another note on the topic of "stickiness"... I've had several people suggest to reading Made To Stick which deals with that very issue. I haven't gotten around to that one yet though. Someday soon... :-)

How many questions do you ask during your explanations?

I ask because it's very easy to get wrapped up in your own words, ignoring the blooming confusion in the person you're talking with.

You might try some experiments around asking questions. For example, when you give analogies about math you think your daughter would understand, ask her to explain it back to you - before you're done. Or - after a few sentences, ask her what she thinks will come next.

On the topic of actually explaining things, you might consider doing the "tap test" with your daughter.

Pick a song you're certain she'll be able to recognize, just from the rhythm you tap on a tabletop. Then tap it out. And watch in bewilderment as she has no idea what you're tapping.

Turn it around and ask her to tap a song she's certain you'll recognize. It's a lot of fun and a very good way to understand just how hard it can be to teach anything. Works great with any friend or family member as well.

To be explicit, the outcome of the tap test is surprising because as we tap, we're hearing the rest of the music in our own heads. But the other person can't, of course. That's what happens to a lot of people when they explain things. They hear the parts they're not actually saying, but the other person can't. Understanding this phenomenon is the first step to doing something about it.

You can read more about the tap test in the book "Made to Stick," which is about explaining things in general and is a great read.

The Founder and CEO had an incredibly clear and actionable vision: "we are THE low-cost airline."

This worked like magic both internally and externally. At the company, answers to even the most complex questions could be rendered relatively obvious through the lens of this mantra. Does it increase costs or not? (e.g. Halloween costumes for employees? Sure. Lunch on the Houston to Florida flight? Nope - would raise costs).

And externally, customers know why to fly Southwest: it's cheaper.

If your vision isn't as succinct and actionable as Southwest's, then it's not clear enough: both for employees and for potential customers.

While I'm with you on the concern with the tainted associated, I couldn't disagree more with the above sentiment. Conveying something in a few words incredibly powerful and incredibly hard... Starting with something your audience is familiar with is an incredible asset.

It doesn't cheapen the movie "Alien" to pitch it as "Jaws on a spaceship". (hat tip to the book "Made to Stick").

The best book I read in 2009 (and possibly ever!) was "Fooled By Randomness" - a fantastic book that I can't recommend enough. I also read the sequel, "Black Swans", that was interesting but not in the same league.

"Made to stick" was also a great book, with lots of great marketing advice that is simple to follow.

Getting past the endowment effect also comes down to using concrete metrics. What's more effective? "My product has the latest and greatest features, it is so much better than the competition" or "If you use my product, it will save you X amount of time and/or Y dollars"? Obviously the latter. Saving time and money is a compelling value proposition--they are both easy-to-understand concepts that cut through consumers' irrationality bubble. Naturally, to be able to make this claim, you've got to make something that consumers want and that is also easy to use.

For a great book on this topic, check out Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham

b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini

c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; -Only print, no audio

d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

- "Made to stick" by Chip and Dan Heath

- "The Dissapearing Spoon" got me curious about chemistry

-"Uncle Tungsten" by Oliver Sacks got me started on the rest of his books, taking my fascination in chemistry and nudging it towards medicine, neurology and psychology.

- "The Social Animal" and "Influence" showed me more about psychology

- Borrowing a copy of the classic textbook Gray's Anatomy while recuperating from a serious accident showed me how fascinating the human body is

The Thinking Toolbox by Bluedorn is pretty good. The target age starts at 12-13.

For me, this is still too advanced for the age range 6-8 I am looking for. The biggest challenge is taking these abstract ideas and making them accessible and interesting to a child.

I taught a few lessons in Scratch programming last year to grades 1-5. Before I conceptualized the lessons, I had listened to the audio book Made to Stick. I found this was helpful in thinking about how I should communicate these abstract ideas about programming to younger kids.

Not necessarily. I troll people all the time by saying things that are true but sound wrong to the average person, and never in bad faith. PG and Zed Shaw frequently do the same thing, albeit in different ways, and I wouldn't say that they're acting in bad faith either.

To the extent the book Made To Stick is correct that people are much more likely to become engaged with and ultimately remember things that seem wrong or counterintuitive at first, trolling at it's best is just a highly effective didactic technique.

The cliche adage here is that "if you can't explain your product in one or two sentences then I'm not interested". This is why the "Hollywood pitch" developed organically because people love to overcomplicate everything. VCs look for this as well.

This is why PhDs such as the author make bad people for communicating products. They love abstract terms and advanced hand wavy generalizations. Same with how corporate marketing people are similarily bad because they love buzz words and trends.

Ethereum is full of these companies that are hyper complex and I'm convinced that it's correlated to the number of academics behind all of them. They all have great website designs, they should spend similar time and money on good copywriting - which starts with the founders understanding their own product/service.

They all have a problem with communicating anything of substance. Ethereum has the same problem.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400064287/

Books that I'd recommend: Anything by Peter Drucker, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers, Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne, among others. I'm sure plenty others here will also give you other recommendations that seem more 'start-up' like too.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Made-Stick-ideas-others-unstuck-x/dp...

I get where you're coming from, but this statement is easily disproven with any example of anybody who enjoys any repetitive task.

I think the difference between painful and tolerable (or even fun!) repetition is context and measurement. You need to know why you're doing what you're doing, how it matters, how it helps.

I remember reading in 'Made To Stick' about this famous cookhouse in Iraq, where the chef felt that him and his crew weren't merely responsible for providing rations, but for the morale of the troops. To them, their repetitive work had meaning.

Repetition can also be fun when you get better at what you're doing. Look up videos on YouTube of folks in India making prata– they add all sorts of styles and flourish to their mundane tasks, and they clearly take a lot of pride in being so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egltg4kW06Q

http://is.gd/2oWe

http://is.gd/2sJw

http://is.gd/TJD

The problem is: his best posts are good enough to keep me reading him every once in a while so he wins. If you want to know about marketing/PR my recommendation is to read Made to Stick.

All successful marketing comes down to a fundamental understanding of people, how we like to be spoken to, what captures our attention, and what messages stick.

Read my notes and excerpts on some of these books to get an idea if they're what you're looking for:

==

Small is the New Big - by Seth Godin

A "best-of" collection of small essays about marketing. Seth writes in general terms meant to give you perspective, change the way you think about marketing, and inspire you to actions, no matter how small, that make all the difference. Read anything by Seth Godin (as others here have said), but this is his best overview.

http://sivers.org/book/SmallIsTheNewBig

==

Made to Stick - by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

A deep analysis of what makes certain ideas or stories memorable.

http://sivers.org/book/MadeToStick

==

You, Inc - The Art of Selling Yourself - by Harry Beckwith

Harry Beckwith is amazing. Read everything by him. This is just his newest. He's the best at reminding you how basic human consideration translates into marketing.

http://sivers.org/book/YouInc

==

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got - by Jay Abraham

Jay Abraham is an absolute marketing genius from an angle the others here don't cover. This gets you into his mindset, seeing profitable aspects in your business you never noticed before, and how to communicate them to your audience. Sorry I don't have notes on this one:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312284543

-Selling The Invisible by Harry Beckwith (great look at selling services)
-Secrets of Closing The Sale by Zig Ziglar (gets you prepared for objections)
-How to Become A Rainmaker by Jeffrey Fox (shortcuts to better sales techniques)
-The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer (best first book for first time salespeople)

As mentioned in other posts, I would also add SPIN Selling, Mastering the Complex Sale and The Referral Engine.

"Smart" books in the sales space include Influence, Made To Stick, To Sell Is Human.

For motivation, read more Zig, Tony Robbins, and Dale Carnegie.

* Predictably Irrational - How Humans behave and why.

* 4 hour work week - About how to earn money to live not live to earn money

* Made to stick - How to convey ideas in a way others will remember

* Lean Startup - How to build products using continuous innovation

* Guerrilla Marketing - Basic Marketing principles in 30 days

* Rework - Myth Buster for Internet/Tech companies

* Outsider Edge - Condensed History and reasoning for success of self-made billionaires

* Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun - About Linus Torvalds

Ebooks ( haven't finished reading yet, but they are great so far )

* Getting thing Done - Management principle for knowledge workers by David Allen

* Agile Development - Building Rails apps using agile methodology

I can't believe I've finished 8 books in 2011, long live audio books.

YC espouses building something people want. To get coverage, you need to build something people want to talk about. You can substitute connections, bulldog PR folks, or hurl money at the problem, but IMO you should never attempt PR until you're pretty sure you have something to talk about that makes a reporter say, "Holy crap-- that'll make a good story".

The common response is that it's really hard to be worth talking about with a boring product, right? Because no one wants to talk about shoe companies (except Zappos) or project management software (except 37Signals), right? If your product isn't inherently interesting, you need to craft a different story. About customer service mania or simplicity. Or how the idea came to you. Or how your founders are living cheap to avoid funding (TicketStumbler has done a killer job here).

Seriously, read "Made to Stick", or at very least read the summary. http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

Nick was actually monitoring this thread, and read me aloud your comment about "Facebook, Frappr, Blfousajf" and I thought he was kidding around, nice one.

I actually just got done reading "Made to Stick," "Landing Page Optimization," "Supercrunchers," "Word of Mouth Advertising," and "Call to Action." Generally my favorite was Made to Stick, but I'll pick up a copy of that Guide to Guerrilla Marketing you mentioned and read through it. All the books I've picked up so far have been YC recommendations, so it can't be that bad!

Regarding the networking, there are some things in the area I can look into, mostly tech entrepreneurs that get together and talk shop.

Again, thanks for the comments, I really appreciate them.

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writing...

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/03/how-to-blog...

Have you checked out the book Why Don't Students Like School? I've heard it also explores this, but I haven't had time to read it yet. The book Made To Stick actually has a chapter on this as well. This is a problem that I've been somewhat obsessed with for several years now.

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - just the best overview for how to get out there (in the words of Steve Jobs, "it's a noisy world, the best you can ever hope or ask for is that just one single idea about what you do can be remembered"). Also might as well throw Positioning in there as its compliment.

Made to Stick - how to encapsulate a single idea, and hook it in people's minds

Founders at Work - a huge boost of motivation and some interesting individual strategies that people used, but light on useful tactics or broad strategies that you can action.

Not on the list, but I really highly recommend, is "Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works" - an absolute bible for how to get your words on a website to be read and remembered.

http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

They MIGHT have done it with PR talent/relationships and outreach... But quite possibly all they did is craft their story well. The "green" stuff is really hip right now, so that gives them a HUGE leg up.

(we've gotten ridiculous PR and blog coverage and not once did we ever hire a PR pro or email a reporter)

Call to Action
http://www.calltoactionbook.com/
(how to think about landing pages and navigation)

Landing Page Optimization
http://landingpageoptimizationbook.com/
(best technical book on how to measure landing pages, do not buy SEO books, they're all terrible and rehash what you see on most blogs)

Word of Mouth Marketing
http://wordofmouthbook.com/
(sometimes great marketing has nothing to do with what you do on the web)

Made to Stick
http://www.madetostick.com/
(just a great read on how you should shape your copy and ideas so they have maximum sticking power)

- Checklist Manifesto
- Made to Stick
- Confessions of a Public Speaker
- Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite
- The Power of Habit

I think the fact that he's questioning the value of reading such books is fair (and I find it ironic that he's applying such rigor to try and extract value from such books), but these are hardly the books of great literature. Self-improvement and self-motivation books are, perhaps too often, profit-guided and banal.

You don't read, say, Steinbeck or Vonnegut, to 'remember what's in them.' (Furthermore, things like 'active recall' aren't going to help you out.) Authors you have made it to the upper echelons of literature are the ones who develop distinct voices and talents to attract and evoke you in ways lesser literature cannot (I can barely remember East of Eden , but I can point to the emotions it made me feel and the questions it raised about my life) -- these are the books worth reading, worth bruising yourself on.

I would recommend against hiring a undergraduate music student. The may be economical option but these folks may have the "The Curse of Knowledge" as per the book Made To Stick. They will not have the patience to understand what it is like to learn something since it has been a long time since they were in the same shoes.

A seasoned teacher will understand where you are likely to get confused and need to really focus on to help you with the bumps and learn more quickly. They will have also reasonable expectations. This is along the same lines as Sir Ken Robinson stated in a TED presentation that college professors and TA are the worst teachers since everything came easy to them so they never fell into the same pitfalls that most students are stuck in. And so are unable to really help these students who initially struggle.

Hope that helps.
PS Pick someone who really enjoys the instrument. Yes there are teachers that hate the instrument they teach.

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com

I'm currently reading "Made to Stick": http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140... - which I put off buying for a while, but am actually enjoying quite a bit. It's got real, actionable advice in it.

I also read the transcripts from http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ on a regular basis.

Nearby shelf:
The Design of Everyday Things,
Maverick,
Founders at work,
A Brief History of Time,
A Pattern Language,
Peopleware,
Made to stick,
Web Standards Solutions,
Designing Interactions,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
The Mythical Man-Month,
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Other good reads:
Blink,
Tipping Point,
Long Tail,
Freakonomics

1. Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman. If you're going to read one, read this. A lot of theory undergirding how people think. Decision making by people will make a lot more sense after this.

2. Influence - Robert Cialdani. Less theory and more pragmatic advice on how to influence people.

3. Drive - Daniel Pink, Switch - Chip Heath, Made to Stick - Chip Heath, Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely. Books on specific sub-categories. More pop-psych. Information density is less, but easier to read.

4. Poor Charlie's Almanac - Charlie Munger. Best known as Warren Buffett's partner, this book is a collection of his speeches, letters, etc... You get an idea of how he thinks but, but you have to dig through the repetitive ramble to get it. Think of it as Charlie observing a lot of the prior principles but putting it into a real life/business context.

1. The Art of Learning - I'll never think about practice the same way.

2. Getting Things Done - Enough has been said about this elsewhere, but the whole concept of "what's the next action" has really worked for me.

3. E-Myth Revisited - This was my MBA in one book. It came at the right time for me and really changed the way I think about creating businesses as assets. I wasn't a fan the cheesy example of the pie shop, but the advice has been invaluable.

Others that I found interesting, and that changed the way I think were:

4-hour Work Week. Yes, there is a ton of hype around this book, but I'd be surprised if anyone read it with an open mind and didn't learn anything or come away motivated to experiment with their lifestyle.

Outliers. This one probably stands out to me since I read it so recently. Gladwell gets a lot of hype as well, but I think he deserves at least some of it.

The Culture Code drastically changed the way I think about marketing.

And, a few random notes on the others I've read:

I found Predictably Irrational, Brain Rules and The 48 Laws of Power to be mostly garbage.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics and Made to Stick are decent essays in book form.

Stumbling on Happiness is not nearly as good as Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis which would be in the first list I made above if it were on Siver's list.

Seth Godin's books are good for motivation and for changing the way you think about marketing, especially if you've been doing it for a long time (I haven't). They're quick and fun, I think they're worth reading.

Fooled By Randomness is worth reading if nothing else because Taleb is such an entertaining writer.

Read the book "Made to Stick" and ask yourself how sticky your story is (you don't HAVE a story-- that's the problem).

Look at Balsamiq-- that guy had a STORY that people wanted to read, so people wrote about him.

Nobody wants to read about a product with no angle. What's your twist? How are you surprising? What you can say about your product that blows people away? Have you changed someone's life? How are you going to effect the reader of this story?

Clarity (and speed) of the site is a problem, but I think your bigger problem (from a PR perspective) is that you just aren't telling an interesting story.