Frontdoor.com, the real estate site run by Scripps Networks (of HGTV and Food Network fame) has just released a very nice set of widgets that enable publishers – Realtors, for example – to embed Frontdoor/HGTV content within their websites or blogs [disclosure: 1000watt Consulting has provided services for Frontdoor.com in the past.]
Frontdoor has stayed largely under the radar within the real estate industry. And they seem to be fine with that. After all, when you can promote your website to 90 million households through HGTV on a regular basis, getting love from people like me is really not that exciting.
They’ve slowly but consistently improved the site over the past 18 months. First city guides. Then a rather prescient implementation of Facebook Connect. And, now, a distributed content play.
A content and brand lesson
Widgets as a distribution channel are nothing new. Trulia and Zillow both came out with their own property and market data widgets years ago.
Frontdoor’s announcement is really notable for two reasons:
First, the content delivered through the widgets is unique and compelling. It’s more than listings. More than median price charts. It’s a slice of the sometimes instructive, sometimes fatuous, but always well-done content HGTV has used to gather the attention of millions of American consumers.
Second, each widget is strongly marked by the HGTV brand. Normally, slipping your brand onto a widget is a little dicey. People love to add free stuff to their website, but don’t like to give too much credit to the source.
But if you’re HGTV, people want your brand on their website.
My point: the relationship between content and brand is symbiotic. Content can help you build a brand and that brand, in turn, can help drive distribution of content. This is critically important in an age when, as John Battelle argues, “all brands are publishers.”
Content is King; “curation” is absurd.
One of the big debates going on right now about the future of the web is between content and “curation.”
There are those who think the investment in, and creation of, quality content – whether that be data, text, video or other media – is still a viable strategy.
Others think crafting quality content is the quaint practice of journalists, artists and others who labor under the delusion that people care about the integrity of their work and the institutions in which they create it. What’s really important is “curation” – a pretentious word that basically means “organizing stuff on the web.” Did you know you can “Curate” tweets? Or that a whole category of apps is being developed that will enable you to preside as the “curator” of things like Gowalla check-ins?
I guess you can tell where I come down on this. One could “curate” the empty beer cans in a frat house; I could “curate” my toenail clippings. But what of it? The content’s the thing.
Real estate content revisited
So, back to real estate: what Frontdoor is doing amid this debate is to continue to bet that quality content matters. They’re way ahead of most, and certainly you and I don’t have the brand mojo of HGTV. But I would encourage you to think beyond the tweets, the Likes and the charts just about everyone else has and ponder what your own brand of compelling content might be.
There are plenty of examples in real estate:
“The Corcoran Report” helped build a brand and the brand, once built, drove the further distribution of the content.
The great real estate writer Bob Bruss meticulously crafted real estate newsletters for over thirty years. It built his brand. And his brand got him in over 200 newspapers.
And while it pales in comparison, content has been central to the development of our brand here at 1000watt (Speaking of which, if you haven’t done so already, you really should sign up for Spotlight, our new email newsletter.)
It’s got to be good. It takes a lot of work. And quality doesn’t magically attract an audience. But content – and those who create it – will always be Kings.
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This is something we’ve been working on at NAR as well. In addition to having similar widgets http://www.houselogic.com/widgets/ we’ve been working on other ways to encourage our members distribute our content. http://www.houselogic.com/members .
I think, no matter how great your content is, the people who redistribute it need multiple options for how they want to display it. The sweet spot is when you can find a way to distribute content that enhances the producer’s and the distributor’s stature at the same time.
We (at PhoenixHomes.com) built a few plugins that “curate”, I guess, 3rd party data (from Zillow, Trulia, Yelp, Altos and others) into widgets. And of course, to be in compliance with the providers, widgets have to display logos, disclaimers and other credits that vendors require. One of the most popular questions that we get from agents is how to remove the credits. Personally, I think, the widgets would be more usable if the providers would create them in a way to retain the visitors on the site they originally landed, and not try to steer them away to their own pages. I think Apture nailed the whole idea perfectly.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marc Davison, Joel Burslem, Patrick Healy, Brian Boero, The DeskFees Team and others. The DeskFees Team said: New on @1000Watt | Frontdoor.com releases widgets: a lesson in the value of content and brand http://bit.ly/cZWKdP [...]
Todd – I should have mentioned HouseLogic as it is a fine example of what I’m talking about.
Max – I think the design of a widget is driven by the objectives behind it which, in most cases, include clicks, links and brand recognition.
Bryan – it seems to me that many widget providers pay very little attention to the actual objectives, or they concentrate on the wrong ones. From the widget user stand point, the widgets are great for extending services, content/data and enhance website user experience – not driving visitors away to the widget provider. When providers’ objectives only include “clicks, links and brand recognition” it become advertisement with very little to no benefit to the widget user… agents might as well make profit by providing relevant contextual advertisement from other big brands, this way, at least, they’ll get paid for the clicks. Sorry, I got carried away from the the main subject.
Apologies for my terrible spelling, Brian. I know I can’t blame English being my 3rd language in this case
Seems like this is the same as saying “hey, I having nothing to communicate to my website visitors, so how about some content that will never compell you to put me to work.”
This seems like putting google ads on your website but not getting paid for it.
I think the genius here is being able to associate yourself with a brand that a large portion of America loves. So, yeah, their logo is on it and they’re getting eyeballs out of it, but as an agent I’m getting to borrow a bit of their cool factor that could ultimately help me be seen as more relatable and approachable to my clients. I’m not so sure that other widgets I’ve used before gave me anything like that. Plus, their stuff is spot on and actually supports the role of the agent in real estate transactions. So, the only downside i see here is that I feel like the video widget could have actually played the video instead of sending me back to their site to view it.
Brian this post makes me proud that there are people in our industry that blog at the highest level. I, like many, am very selective with which sites I will subscribe to but am never disappointed to see a new 1000watt post in my inbox. I put you guys on a Chris Brogan/Seth Godin level which is rare air and the fact that everything you guys put out is RE industry specific makes reading your stuff something that I enjoy even more than theirs. Also wanted to congratulate you guys on the Inman nomination which is 1000% deserved (pun intended)!
Chris – you are *way* too generous in your comments, but thanks a lot for reading. We appreciate it.
We do put a lot of work and thought into what we write (and don’t write) on this blog. It’s not easy. But as this last post suggests, it’s worth it.
Brian, thanks for letting us know about Frontdoor.com widgets, they seem promising.
Kris Skavish points out that your chances of becoming the top destination for Consumers is next to zero, but that you can make a big impact when you distribute content. She goes on to talk about Local Matter’s real estate portal software Destination Search is helping Publishers syndicate content in a variety of ways, including widgets in her most recent blog post.
[...] widget displays frontdoor.com’s branding. 100wattconsulting.com’s Brian Boero argues that the popularity of the HGTV brand may actually make the widgets more [...]
[...] displays frontdoor.com’s branding. Branding on widgets can sometimes deter users, however 100wattconsulting.com’s Brian Boero argues that the popularity of the HGTV brand may actually make the widgets more [...]
Cool to see continued innovation in this space; a lot of great solutions were mentioned above, and I expect that in the next few years we’ll see even better tools introduced.
One of the main reasons we started http://TurnSocial.com was because we saw a need for a simple, clean way to put businesses social content to work on their website, without driving visitors away via outbound buttons or links. Find us on Yelp or Foursquare? Well, now Yelp reviews and Foursquare tips can be built into every page. Neighborhood Walkscore/Rentwiki reviews/local news based on your street address? Also built right in. You could clutter up your whole page with embedded widgets from FB, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, but we think some people would rather put that white space to better use, and try our multi-app solution instead.
I’m sure I come off sounding like a guy who’s just trying to plug his product (sure, there’s a little bit of that going on
), but the topic of this post was so relevant to my domain that I felt I had to chime in. There are well funded, awesome companies out there in our space, and our goal is to differentiate by listening intently to what the marketplace has to say, and building a utility with true value to our customers (not just charging for usage or sharing ad revenue built off of YOUR traffic). Our app is pretty simple right now, but we’re just getting started.
It would be great to hear feedback from readers of this blog – even if you want to tear us down, it will only help us get better. Thanks for consistently producing and curating such great content – have a great 4th of July weekend.
Btw, I’m not trying to take anything away form Frontdoor’s embedded widgets – they’re actually pretty awesome, and we’d love to work with them if they were ever interested.
Thanks!
Hey Brian,
I plugged one of the video widgets into a site for testing.
It doesn’t play the video in place, it just immediately pulls the visitors back to frontdoor.com
I guess that might be ok (maybe) but then the video also had a preview ad from Remax! Not so good if I’m not a remax agent.
To the issue of curation, I think Frontdoor would get a lot more distribution from the curators if they simply made certain videos available (play in place) for use on other sites, etc
A step better/further would be to integrate some type of lead capture opportunity like Altos does
What do you think?
[...] Normally, we wouldn’t highlighting this many feature launches back-to-back, but what with its launch of content widgets last week, and now this, Frontdoor seems to emerging from its slumber and innovating rather [...]
I think widgets are great as long as the add useful information to your website. If they serve to drive traffic away from your website, they had better be VERY useful to the consumer …