June 11th, 2008
LearnHub & The Mullet Strategy
Version 2 of the LearnHub homepage got out the door today, and was covered by TechCrunch: LearnHub Relaunches Its Social Learning Network. With this we’ve crystilized our homepage strategy around everyone’s favorite hairstyle, The Mullet.
“Business in the front, party in the back.”
The Mullet Strategy
I first heard the term used in this way in an article about The HuffingtonPost in the New Yorker: Out of Print. The term caught my eye because it was funny, memorable, and accurately describes our project.
Business in the Front
There are basically three choices for content you can put on your homepage:
- Static content
- Automaticly-updated content
- Editorial content
The Mullet Strategy suggests avoiding automatically-updated content, because at anytime your front page could be filled with uninteresting (or worse) stuff. But static content won’t work either, unless you don’t want the sort of page people return to regularly. The solution is to have editorial controlled featured slots of user generated content.
Party in the Back
Of course in the internal pages the content should roam wild and free! We work hard to curate the communities to focus on academic education, but most things are allowed. We only remove stuff that’s overtly offensive, because LearnHub is getting a lot of interest from the k-12 community.
The new Social Learning Network
Like a good mullet, LearnHub has way more party than business. We have 17k+ pages indexed in google after a few months.
The Mullet Strategy is being successfully employed at several sites, one of my current favorites is The BleacherReport, from my friend Tung. It is growing very well, and I attribute that to its excellent harnessing of user generated content into a handsome homepage.
More Info
I always thought it was only Don King who had a hair based business strategy.
;)
Congrats on the launch guys - and nice hockey haircut.