Even the worst Scrooge can’t help but get into the Christmas spirit when Darlene Love takes to David Letterman’s stage. This year it happens on Friday night. Here’s a mashup of years past.

Last week I pointed you to a veritable cornucopia of social media predictions for 2012. Let’s see what the crystal ball has in store for marketing in general:

iMedia Connection has 7 digital marketing predictions for 2012. “Adapt or die” is part of the first one, so I’m not sure whether these qualify as predictions or alarmist notifications that the sky is falling.

eM+C has a half-dozen predictions for email marketing in the year ahead. That more email will be sent, and that subscribers will demand more respect for their privacy, seem like no-brainers, iffin’ you ask me.

Abnormal Marketing (love the name) delivers something of a roundup of predictions from other blogs, and — heeeeyyyyyyy, wait a minute.

Emily Riley’s blog on Forrester has a bunch of predictions and declares 2012 the year of the social-mobile customer, which I suppose means that 2012 will be much like 2011.

Agent Media has a dozen thoughts about the coming year, noting that “customers and employees will become an extended part of companies’ marketing teams,” which I suppose means that 2012 will be much like 2010 … and 2009 … and 2008 …

Dreamgrow has 21 social media marketing trends for 2012. I don’t know how I missed this one in last week’s roundup, but when you throw that much spaghetti against the wall, I suppose some of it’s bound to stick.

Well, those ought to keep you busy for a while. If you happen to have an extra dose of holiday energy, why not take a closer look at all those predictions for 2011 and see who got it right and who didn’t … or who just threw out a bunch of buzzwords that resulted in a bunch of non-prediction predictions.

It’s gotta suck sometimes being one of the top social media gurus on the planet.

I mean, sure, your Twitter feed gets a coupla hundred thousand followers. You get to do keynote speeches at big conferences. Your book gets ranked in the top 100 of Internet Marketing books on Amazon.

Ah, yes. The books.

I got an email the other day from Amazon telling me all about Chris’ new book: Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything. On the one hand, I respect anyone who manages to crank out a book and make a decent buck doing so. On the other hand, I really feel sorry for Chris on this one.

I can only imagine how it all went down. Step one: Google+ debuts. Step two: There’s all sorts of excitement about Google+. Step three: The book deal is made. Step four: The book is written. Step five: The book gets published.

Somewhere between steps four and five, though, something went askew. What, you ask? Well, check out these posts, for example:

Why Google+ Failed (miserably), How to Use Idiotic Facebook Addictions to Grow Your Business, & Did They Lie To You About Traffic!?

A Eulogy for Google Plus

Google+ Pages Officially a Failure (So Far)

Google Engineer Calls Google Plus a ‘Complete Failure’; 5 Reasons We Agree

Well, you get the idea.

So where does this leave Chris? I have no idea; my guess, though, is that it’s either hoping Google+ turns around so he’s proven correct (not likely), wishing he’d never written the book in the first place (maybe) or hoping the next big thing comes along and people forget about Google+ and his book (most likely).

(Of course, not having read the book, maybe it’s a screed about how the failure of Google+ changes everything. If so, ignore everything you’ve just read in this post.)

I do think it’s all a good example of a general tendency toward hyper-accelerated expertise these days. Anytime something slightly significant happens in the world of digital communications, it takes about 12 seconds for there to be dozens upon dozens of blog posts analyzing why that slightly significant something will be the complete game-changer everyone’s been waiting for. After 37 seconds or so, there are probably book deals being discussed.

My advice: Calm down. Let the slightly significant something be absorbed by both the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas. THen step back and take a look and see if it’s worth all that and a bag of chips.

Takeaway for marketers: Sometimes being the best is better than being the first.

I’ve generally been more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy (though DC’s Vertigo line has some of the best comics being produced today), but College Humor’s Internet Justice League is worth checking out, if only for the brilliant insight of depicting Yahoo! as the Bizarro Google.

Not a bad list.