It’s that time of year when the Wright Strategies team converges with other like-minded, technology leaders and enthusiasts to learn about the latest trends, emerging tactics and best practices in web design and development. We're gearing up for SXSW Interactive, a five day interactive conference held in Austin each spring. Stay tuned for upcoming articles recounting what we’ve learned, what we’re excited about, and how it can help your site reach its maximum potential. Want more info on SXSWi? Visit http://www.sxsw.com/interactive. 

The Austin office will be closed from Friday, March 12 through Tuesday, March 16 but our support line is always open.  If you need immediate assistance with your site during that time, please email support@wrightstrategies.com.

The new year has come and somehow already gone and some of us are still reeling over how quickly time is passing by.  But with each new year comes the inevitable lists recounting "The Top <insert anything you can imagine>" of the past year, decade, millennium, etc.  I personally enjoy these lists as they help me recall all the events that have happened in my life that seemed monumental as they were occurring yet had somehow slipped my memory before being immortalized in a year-end list.  Of course, some of my favorite lists from 2009 were related to everyone’s activity on the internet over the past year.  Lists from facebook recounting the top status update terms and from Bing showing us their top search terms for the year, seem like a pretty accurate gauge for determining what we cared most about and wanted to learn more about in 2009. 

Any predictions for top terms in 2010?

Yesterday, eMarketer published comScore's results for 2009 ecommerce spending during the holiday season. The months of November and December saw a great change from 2008, with sales increasing by 4%.

The top five US holiday ecommerce spending days were:

1. Tuesday, December 15 ($913 million)
2. Cyber Monday, November 30 ($887 million)
3. Tuesday, December 1 ($886 million)
4. Wednesday, December 16 ($874 million)
5. Monday, December 14 ($854 million)

eMarketer also notes that mobile sales increased during the holidays, with eBay reporting three times the number of mobile sales than in 2008. Increased holiday sales in the ecommerce and mobile commerce realms point toward a positive outlook for online shopping in 2010. View the full report here.

Just a reminder, our offices will be closed from noon on December 23 through January 3. If you need anything during this time, feel free to email us at info@wrightstrategies.com.

And for some holiday fun, check out the Holiday Issue of our newsletter and these pictures from our 2009 Awarards Ceremony and Team Building Day in Portland, Oregon!

Happy Holidays!

The face of social networks has changed drastically in the past year. Last May, MySpace was the clear winner, in terms of US unique visitors, averaging double the visits of Facebook. We anticipated things would change at some point, but the growth is astounding. In the past year, Facebook has seen a 97% increase in monthly visitors, while MySpace suffered a 5% decrease. Even though the two giants saw a similar number of visitors this May, it seems natural for the trend to continue, leaving Facebook in the lead.

There’s a clear break in visitors between the top two social networking sites and Twitter, which is ranked third, after experiencing huge growth during the past year. Since May of 2008, Twitter’s number of monthly visitors has increased by 2,681%! Much of this can be contributed to the micro-blogging site being adopted by so many celebrities, high profile bloggers and media outlets. However, Twitter’s approx. 17.5 million unique visitors pale in comparison to the 70 million visits Facebook and MySpace received.

For more info and a list of the top twenty social networks, check out this eMarketer article.