Sticky: Defined.

Sticky in action.

Imagine you are a hurried commuter rushing into the New York City subway to get to work. Every morning, paper guys hand out free newspapers in the station and on most of the street corner. You always rush by the loud cries of “Paper! Paper, here! Free paper!” You are under-caffeinated, late and you don’t read the paper anyway. But one morning you are about to go into the turnstile and as you pass one particular paper guy who looks you in the eye, smiles and says warmly “Good morning!” You take a paper.

Sticky as concept.

Sticky is a principle that we can find everywhere, in all forms of communication. If you can’t remember what you talked to your mom about last night but you remember a 30 year-old commercial jingle, that’s stickiness. Ideas that stay with you are sticky. If ideas are sticky enough they become viral.

Malcom Gladwell, bless him, pioneered the idea of stickiness in his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The idea of stickiness was recently further expanded by Chip and Dan Heath in the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, two brothers who, in their own ways, were both after the definition of sticky. The idea of stickiness just, well, um, stuck.

This is the Purple Cow taken one step further: it’s beyond remarkable, it’s memorable.

So thanks to Mr. Gladwell and the Brothers Heath: Write Sticky was born.

Write Sticky is about how to harness the stickiness factor so that your pitches, articles, blog posts, newsletters and whatever else get read, enjoyed and remembered.