Referral marketing

OK, so we all prefer to buy off a business someone has recommended to you. The second opinion counts, be it from a friend, a business acquaintance or a consumer review from Which? We all like to be told what is good without having to go to the bother of investigating it ourselves and possibility investing resources (buying a meal) and getting stung. Amazon has used this to great effect with consumer reviews (even if some of them are now obviously corporate shills). 

We are considering (in a later release, we need to ship our initial product first) adding consumer reviews to the directory part of www.OpenYourDiary.com but for this post I just want to ask a simple question. 

How can we generate referrals for a business that has not yet launched or is very new so does not have many customers. 

On the website itself we are writing generic case studies of how owners of different types of business can use the various features of OYD to make their life easier and business more profitable. 

We can ask friends to create links from their websites and post links on forums etc. We could also provide items (business cards, pens etc) that refer to our site and spread these about (this is likely to be too expensive for us). 

Should we concoct a press release?

Any ideas?