Houzz.com - example of an Inbound Community Hub

I hadn’t even come across Houzz before. What a beautiful site. I took a quick look over the site and tried to figure out how it compares with Pinterest. I think I’m missing something here and I don’t mind admitting that maybe I just “don’t get it” as they used to say in the early dot com days. It looks to me like photos from remodeling and design professionals are willingly uploaded to the site with the expectation that site visitors will include them in their “idea books”. Pinterest users on the other hand are pinning photographs from across the web using a “Pinning” browser extension or app. These sites could be photographer’s professional websites and pinners will grab images and pin to their Pinterest boards regardless of having gained the artist’s permission. The onus is on the photographer to block pinners or file a complaint directly with Pinterest to have possibly thousands of instances of a photograph removed from Pinterest boards.
I must be missing something with Houzz - can you explain it? Houzz seems to me to be a quintessential example of Content Strategy — or Content Marketing if you consider that the end goal is to generate business. It’s the new way — like a housing community doing what Hubspot advocates — offer value that brings the customer to you instead of having to go out to find customers yourself. An Inbound Community Hub. Fantastic!
Thanks so much Janet. I am so glad to have seen this site. For me, this might be the best example yet of truly community-driven Inbound Marketing — you have a community of design professionals and a community of enthusiastic amateur home-remodelers all collaborating and exchanging value. Brilliant. The possibilities for this are so broad, so expansive.