North by South (NXS) is excited to be attending the SMASH Summit that’s happening in San Francisco this week. And, we’re also just happy to see more events like this happening, as the industry starts to normalize some of the innovations that we have been recommending to clients. It’s going to make our jobs that much easier.

The way NXS operates, we make a lot of recommendations to our clients (or potential clients) after we hear out what they want to do. This includes a lot of very specific recommendations that are unique to each project but, for instance, some recommendations aren’t confidential eyes-only secrets: Most projects we come into contact with, we recommend building everything with open source/free software platforms. We recommend that the project is managed like open source projects are managed (because it works). Obviously, we recommend building a flexible team out of a distributed network of developers from the Latin American free software world.

For the most part, all of this makes perfect sense to all types of clients. And once the website or application is built, and our client tells us their pageview/traffic/revenue goals, we recommend using a methodology that is one of our strongest skill-sets we offer: the science and art of social/viral analysis-based marketing. And, sometimes, it’s a little harder to convince clients that they should be doing this.

We explain the logic of it. We also explain that our core team in San Francisco includes people who have been involved in all facets of designing, engineering, launching, scaling and optimizing literally several dozen virality-centered websites for going on a decade now, including Tagged.com (which recently announced a deal to exclusively rock a streaming Bon Jovi performance to its 80 million users; the user metric makes them the third largest social network in the US).

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; they overestimate how many new websites the average user really takes seriously 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.”

At NXS, we’ve gotten pretty good at explaining all this and walking clients through the scenarios. We’ve moved entire web businesses to healthy, metrics-driven growth. 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 returns from disciplined, metrics/testing/analysis-based website management, the rest usually comes naturally.

The point 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. And we’re glad to see that happening.