As of today, July the 15th, 2006 the five most read articles on Red Canary are:

1. My blog “Buzz on or Buzz off about 2.0” read it now
2. Malgosia Green’s blog “The Importance of Focus” read it now
3. Craig Fitzpatrick’s blog “When you’re small” read it now
4. “7 hiring tips for startups” read it now
5. The ‘Lessons’ interview with Kash Hassan read it now

So of the top 5 articles on Red Canary, only 2 were summoned by my keystrokes.

Shakespeare I am not.

Calling myself a ‘hack’ may be a bit offside, but the popularity of bloggers and equally soluble content on Red Canary does deliver an important message to startups:

I’ll try to connect the dots

• Humanity – all but one piece is about or created by an accessibly ‘real’ person (not by a professional writer in his highback chair).

• Brevity – they are all among the shortest and most easily read.

• Faces – they have images of people, not objects – and people click on people first.

• Reward – each of the top 5 hints at the reader’s reward for clicking: a good, human story.

It says that STORYTELLING SELLS. It’s an axiom the advertising world learned 50 years ago (only to forget today).

How do you tell a good story?

Get friendly. People want to read about people; they want the crunchy cornflakes of human truth and experience, even if it’s packed with two scoops of real fruit fallacies. Brevity is bestity. Even if you have a complex product and have a lot to say, try not to pack it together in long paragraphs. Layer your message without burying it. Deconstruct it. Compartmentalize. Pay someone who knows what they are doing if you can.

Eschew Orwell. No paragraph – long or short – should contain corporate PR doublespeak. It’s your website, not the Enron trial. Find out what your customer’s stories are and tell them. Bring a camera.

Be clear. Don’t dump company boilerplate on your front page. Actually, try not to dump it anywhere. Say what you do. You don’t have to be trite; just clear.

Own something. If you have a critical message, say it first and say it (differently) last. Package it with ribbon and a bow or people will miss it.

That’s Brisk, baby! The maximal length of a highway billboard is roughly 7 words Web visitors aren’t zooming past at 100 mph, but they are still in a hurry. Deliver your purpose/benefit in one or two sentences and put it somewhere people will read it.

These tenets apply just as strongly to a B2B startup as a ‘Social’ 2.0 site. In fact, the product complexity and long sales cycles of most B2B concerns makes good site management even more of an imperative.

Red Canary’s Lessons

I have learned that blogs have forever changed journalism. People delivering their stories – warts and grammatical farts and all – is simply more real than traditional journalism.

That doesn’t mean we’ll dump longer articles (our numbers say that when people do start reading them, they generally stick around until the end) but they need to be shorter and punchier.

In sum

Many startups choose to cram their website with as much detail as possible without considering a visitor’s motivation or basic human needs.

Navigation and usability is important of course, but without a considered, concise message even great design is wasted.

Want a good website? Use images of (real) people, stir in some verve and honesty and tell human stories.

Everything else will take care of itself.