North by South (NXS) is excited to be attending the SMASH Summit that’s happening in San Francisco this week. NXS has always been very up-front & proud about the innovations we use that differentiate us from just about every other off-shoring company: our free software advocacy, project management based on open source models, organizing ourselves as a distributed network, why we see Latin America as the smart off-shoring choice, etc. Another important distinction is the collective experience of our core management team, based in San Francisco. Our group includes veterans who have worked up through the trenches of breakneck-pace software engineering, “moving target” product development, improvising network configurations while working in Middle East war zones, juggling-act scaling of production environments, migrating change-resistant Brazilian federal workers to open source desktops/laptops. Looking back now, the ulcers weren’t permanent, the lessons learned were invaluable and NXS management relies on this experience while working on project plans & architecture design with our clients.

So, what does all this have to do with the SMASH Summit?

One of our strongest skill-sets is the science and art of social/viral analysis-based marketing. A couple of us have been involved in all facets of designing, engineering, launching, scaling and optimizing literally dozens of virality-centered websites for going on a decade now, including Tagged.com (which recently announced a deal to exclusively stream a live Bon Jovi performance to its 80 million users; the user metric makes them the third largest social network in the US).

NXS talks to and advises all different kinds of individuals and companies on web application development. And, even though peer-initiated user acquisition (viral techniques and analysis) has driven the majority of the Web 2.0 era, there’s still surprisingly little interest and understanding in applying these techniques at many startups and existing web companies.

Our theory is that there’s something in the stories from the dot-com boom that bring out the Horatio Alger in people. With “honesty, thrift, self-reliance, industry and a cheerful whistle,” some startups are convinced that their website or app just needs to get online, get a little attention and the meritocracy will reward them for their one-of-a-kind idea. They underestimate how many websites are out there and they overestimate how many new websites the average user really checks out enough to register and come back.

Some companies are run by witnesses to the unnatural pay-outs during the dot-com boom and take this as evidence that whatever clever idea they have will lead to vast riches. Some serial entrepreneurs with successful acquisitions under their belt from a previous era and are convinced they have another winner. And, there are a lot of new-comers to the internet industry — they have their own money or “friends & family” funding and they’re convinced that if they can just get their site online, the users will come and then the money will come. As a famous American author said: “real Horatio Alger stuff.”

But, too often we’ve seen what these expectations cause: a print-era quest to get everything right in the spec. Pre-production teams go round and round, trying to predict if users will click a certain link more often if it’s placed here or there — dozens of predictive debates about questions that could & should be answered with metrics (an easy testing toolkit and a few iterations). In the worst case, these debates towards an unachievable perfection start to bleed into engineering’s scheduled time. And, even though everyone signs off on a new schedule, engineers are still pushed into long & crazy nights, racing to get the site online before the money runs out. To paraphrase the aforementioned author, the whole effort turns into a terrible moment at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, “still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale San Francisco apartment dressed up as an office …”

At NXS, we’ve gotten pretty good at explaining all this and walking through scenarios with clients to demonstrate how we should strive to get the website online, using what we do know, and then let the users settle these debates by watching what they do. We’ve gotten pretty good at explaining the basic concepts of viral user acquisition — at least enough to help companies start the move in that direction. Once they start seeing the return from disciplined, metrics/testing/analysis-based website management, the rest usually comes naturally.

So, the point of all this is that it’s good to see events happening that help explain all this, that emphasize the use of metrics, social marketing, analysis, leadgen paradigms and so on. From the SMASH Summit’s website, the topics to be covered include:

• Social Networks, Platforms & Apps
• Search Engines (SEO, SEM)
• Mobile & PDA
• Social CRM
• Metrics & Analytics
• Lead Gen & Affiliate Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Links, Embeds, & Widgets

All these topics can become pretty complex but the hard stuff is part of what development firms like NXS should be providing these days. The more that it becomes accepted that these techniques are needed to build successful websites and web applications, the easier it becomes for us to steer clients in that direction.