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I am not one of those people who decorate for holidays. No fall wreaths on the door come October, no bowls of decorative Easter Eggs on the sideboard in April or green Jell-o desserts on St Paddy’s Day. Most of the year I can get away with this but at Christmas people find it shocking. Every person over my threshold after the first weekend in December invariably asks, “Where’s your tree?” So I explain about not wanting to kill even sustainably harvested trees and create fire hazards in the living room and spill water on the Ikea laminate flooring and that the kids are so small that ornaments would be a safety hazard and besides I don’t own any ornaments and we’re going to be on the East Coast starting on the 21st and…it all washes right over them. “You have to get a tree,” they pronounce, in tones of absolute finality. “For the kids. Everyone has a tree. It’s not Christmas without a tree.”

“They’re right,” my husband will say, after the door shuts behind every tree-happy visitor. “Everyone has a tree. Even the Jews next door have a tree.”

“Um,” I usually reply, looking over the edge of my laptop, or up from the floor where I am mopping up dried applesauce, or over from the couch where I am reading Ping to the kids for the 99th time. “You go right ahead.” But somehow my participation seems critical to getting it done and I just don’t prioritize holiday décor. I am Type A about enough things in my life that I can live with my lack of holiday decorating ambition. I put a dried wreath up on the front door back in November as my token offering to the season. It’ll get shoved on a shelf in the garage sometime before Valentine’s Day, missing a few more plastic berries and manufactured twigs, and I’m ok with that.

Back east for the holidays, the selection, erection, and decoration of the tree was a major event at both grandparental gatherings. While there is something magical about a well decorated Christmas tree, I was grateful to get on a plane and fly away from the post- Christmas cleanup ritual of picking pine needles and sap balls out of the rug, dealing with murky tree water and untangling light strings. Back in California, I found a box of secondhand tree ornaments on the front porch. They were a thoughtful Christmas gift from the aforementioned Jews next door, who apparently think we lack Christmas spirit and ought to get a tree next year.

All this got me thinking: Am I a Grinch? Am I the only mom in the world so lacking in holiday spirit as to NOT get and decorate some kind of tree for the holidays? Aren’t there other moms out there who are avoiding the tree ritual because they don’t have the time, the space, the desire, the sheer holiday energy to take on the whole tree thing when they are already baking and wrapping and cooking and shopping? Am I alone?

Turns out- I am alone. The only people who don’t have a Christmas tree are a) on antidepressants that clearly aren’t working, b) homeless, c) about to be abandoned by their feckless parents, d) victims of a natural disaster, or e) completely broke, in which case they are advised to decorate a houseplant or a build their own tree out of scrap wood. One of the greatest things about Web 2.0 is that you never really feel alone. There’s always someone else’s reality to immerse yourself in, a blog, a video, a flickstream, a twitter stream. There are people out there making aircraft out of bic pens and filming transgender OK GO tribute videos and raising worms on organic raisins. Somehow this awesome display of variety usually makes me marvel at the sheer range and exuberance of human endeavor, makes me glad to be a part of it all. This is first time it has made me feel completely alone.

Time to go scoop up some Christmas ornaments in the post holiday sales, I guess.

My sister-in-law needed someone to talk to. She sought me out at a holiday gathering last week, pulled me aside, and as if in a confessional, admitted, “I canceled my Facebook account.”

It was just becoming too much. A bunch of old high school people that she never wanted to talk to again were trying to friend her. The “pending friend request” list was getting longer. She felt anxious that she hadn’t posted anything in weeks, while everyone else was adding photos every day, and giving her digital gifts. Some friends were driving her crazy with their gossip, but could she un-friend them? Do they receive an announcement saying, “You’ve just been un-friended by Jesse”?

It was all too much.

So on the final screen in the close-your-account process, she was surprised and hugely relieved to see: “social stress” as one the possible reason codes. That’s what she checked.

She’s not alone. We humans are programmed to need and seek connection.  Social networking taps into that. But a million friends on MySpace do not necessarily make you a happy and integrated person. It just takes us a while to realize that. It seems there are a few distinct phases in the social networking adoption curve / lifecycle:

1. The New Shiny Object Phase.  This is the phase where anticipation and expectations are high.  You invest time in customizing your pages and profiles and are very proud to be “plugged in”.
2. The Quest for Quantity Phase. How many friends do you have?  How many in your LinkedIn network? You ping everybody.
3. And finally, The Quest for Quality Phase. You may know what someone’s kids ate for breakfast this morning, but that doesn’t really mean much if you haven’t actually spent one minute of time with that person in 6 years.

My personal evolution toward the Quality Phase in 2009 means kicking off the Facebook crutches for a while and really connecting with the people I care about - phone calls, lunches, and after-dinner drinks. It’s amazingly rewarding to reconnect with people that you’ve only seen online for years! Three weeks ago we used Facebook to organize a JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL reunion. Needless to say, it was so much fun. And on my way home from work last night, I called a college roommate at her home in Michigan. She almost fainted. Were we really talking?! We laughed for hours. Something I could never recreate on her Wall.

That’s my evolution. My sister-in-law’s evolution toward quality meant shutting off Facebook all together. What’s yours?

Postscript for my sister-in-law and all of you who are wondering: If you de-friend someone on Facebook, the person does NOT get any proactive notification that an event has occurred. Your face just quietly disappears from their friend list…

If my mom, my dad, my Aunt Mary, or anyone under the age of 60 actually read blogs beyond the Huffington Post, I would be worried that this post would blow my Christmas surprise, but I think I’m safe. I just ordered $2K worth of shoes for them from Zappos. I bought everyone multiple pairs and figured they’d get to keep one and that would be their present.

It’s not the down economy that is making me buy my relatively affluent relatives new shoes for Christmas. Nor do they “need” new shoes, per se. It’s that a) I’m a working mom and have NO time to shop anyplace but online and b) my favorite online shopping site is Zappos. I love the richness of the customer reviews, which help me feel like I’ve hit on just the thing for mom’s size 5 narrows, dad’s size 11 wides, and Aunt Mary’s bunions. I love the wide selection, so I can get a couple backup pairs. I love the free shipping both ways policy, and the well- engineered returns process, which makes buying from them so painless that the only shoes I’ve purchased elsewhere in the last 5 years have been bike shoes and Campers, neither of which they carry (I blame this on Camper). What also strikes me, after reading literally hundred of reviews of shoes in pursuit of the pair that will alleviate Aunt Mary’s suffering, is how almost EVERY review, whatever it says about the shoes, has to mention how great Zappos is. Here’s a random sampling of the Twitter stream:

just signed up for to be a Zappos VIP - free overnight shipping “till the cows come home!” yay!
less than 30 minutes ago
Kids Nike Skeet Jr. !! JUST MY SIZE!!! http://zeta.zappos.com/product/7416570/color/150475
less than 30 minutes ago
I did indeed sign up for Zappos VIP :) I have a pair of boots I’d like… will have to try it after next paycheck
less than 30 minutes ago
roxyyo, @jbillingsley, Great tip on adding live chat to 404 pages. We’re adding it to our Zappos Zeta 404 page: http://zeta.zappos.com/show
less than 30 minutes ago
zappos really is un-frickin-real in their access to consumers. Serious kudos to you guys for re-defining customer care
about 1 hour ago

Zappos is doing a great job of active listening- they have listened to what customers wanted and proactively given it to them, from free shipping to live chat on 404 pages. It seems like a cool place to work though I’m not sure how successful they will be in commoditizing their way of doing business. But compare this to Target, which also has great merchandise and where I actually began my holiday shopping journey:

• Items recommended for Christmas were not available to ship for 2-4 weeks (Um, it’s December 17)
• 7 out of my 8 items were eligible for free shipping, but the eighth one wasn’t, so they wanted to charge me shipping for the whole cart (Um, I PUT some of those things in only because they had free shipping)
• When I tried to find a place to complain, I got a web form. Really makes me feel the love.

Apparently I’m not the only one feeling a lack of love these days: Why ban mobile price checking? And check out this random dip into the Twitter stream for Target. Where is the customer joy?

while wearing a red sweater at target, a fellow customer asked me for help.
less than 15 minutes ago
Has to go to target before work to replace the christmas lights he broke last night.
less than 15 minutes ago
DealNews: Battery-Operated 4-Piece Flickering Tealight Candles for $14 + free shipping: Target offers t.. http://tinyurl.com/5cjpbn
less than 15 minutes ago
heading to target
less than 15 minutes ago
here’s my thing though…i need to stop at target to get a few finishing touches to my gift for my boss tomorrow.
Stupid Target.
less than 30 minutes ago
never going to Target in Newbury Park again… yuck.
less than 30 minutes ago

I’m just sorry to hear that Zappos, like so many other internet companies, in this down economy, trimmed their team. Hope it doesn’t erode the CS that has their customers constantly reviewing, blogging and tweeting about them.

Merry Christmas Zappos - you got my whole holiday budget.

PS: The new shopping interface is a definite improvement, but still needs some work. CALL ME!

This week, findings will be published from some long-term research on the levels of happiness within one’s social network. The finding:  happiness is contagious.

People who live close to and interact with happy people are happier themselves. Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego asked 5000 people and their social networks about their happiness, over
a 20-year period, and the results are fascinating. Happiness appears to spread readily through communities of geographically connected family and friends.

• Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself.
• A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor’s sister’s friend can give you a 5.6% boost.
• A happy friend who lives within a half-mile makes you 42% more likely to be happy yourself. If that same friend lives two miles away, his impact drops to 22%. Happy friends who are more distant have no discernible impact, according to the study.
• Similarly, happy siblings make you 14% more likely to be happy yourself, but only if they live within one mile.
• Next-door neighbors who are happy make you 34% more likely to be happy too, but no other neighbors have an effect, even if they live on the same block.
• The people at the center of the social graph (the popular ones) are happier. (Well maybe this last result is not so ground-breaking.)

Interestingly, the one exception was the work environment. Happy co-workers do NOT make you happier (unless the co-workers are friends). I can see competition in the work environment distorting normal happiness dynamics. And in my experience at many companies, employees are not encouraged to fully express happiness (or sadness, fear, skepticism or any real emotion) in the work environment, thereby preventing their
happiness from spreading. (Reading this makes me so thankful for the culture we have collectively created at Scout Labs where we not only encourage the expression of unique personalities, but we are also truly friends!)

This is being seen as ground-breaking research, because happiness is often thought of as an exceedingly individualistic state - as if happiness is a thermostat which is pretty well set when you are born. It’s also controversial in its claim that physical proximity is what matters most - even if we say we say we stay “connected” with phones and emails and webcams and the like. “We suspect emotions spread through frequency of contact,” Fowler said. As a result, he said, people who live too far away to be seen on a regular basis don’t have much effect.

Why would happiness be infectious? Evolution may have encouraged it if it helped hominids and early humans enhance their social bonds so they could form successful groups, the researchers said.

Part of what’s interesting to me, from a pure research angle, is how they re-created the social network. They started with nearly 5000 research participants, then rounded out
their networks by using home addresses to locate neighbors and employment information to identify co-workers. Altogether, they constructed a social network that included 12,067 study volunteers who were linked to each other through 53,228 ties.  These same researchers have used a similar methodology to show that obesity and smoking spread
among groups of friends and relatives.

So when you head home tonight, remember that the mood you arrive with will be contributing to the mood of not only your husband and your kids, but of your kids’ friends and your next-door neighbor! Be sure to put on some really good music on the way home.

Hello. My name is Julie. I recently joined the Customer Support team at Scout Labs. I am very excited to be here, as I feel this product has incredible potential. (Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be here!) A reminder to current beta users: feel free to send any questions or comments you may have about Scout Labs to me at beta scoutlabs com, as I am here to help you get the most out of using the app. To those of
you who have requested access and are still waiting, we will be extending access to you soon! It’s a promise.

I also look forward to blogging about interesting events in the social media monitoring space. So I just had to post about ‘Motrin Moms’ — the most recent ‘big story’ of corporate
social-media-mismanagement.

Motrin ran an ad
online and in print this fall regarding ‘baby wearing’, which is a term for carrying a baby in a sling, BabyBjorn, or one of those backpack-type devices. The ad claims that it is painful for moms to carry babies this way, and reminds moms that Motrin can help relieve
the pain. I’m not a mom, so I do not really know how offensive this could be, but apparently, it was REALLY offensive to A LOT of moms. They banded together with brute 2.0 force, and within days of the ad being aired, there were droves of moms Twittering and Blogging and Vlogging in outrage. Motrin, slow in their response, did not even acknowledge the movement until weeks later. When they did notice, they had no choice but to take the ad offline, but not before serious brand damage was done. They probably lost a lot of current customers, and more importantly, future customers. Mothers, being the major purchasers within households, are not a good group to alienate. (After all, that
was why they created the ad in the first place - to try and “connect” with this valuable market segment.) AdAge did a great job covering the episode, here.

This is a great example of why a service like Scout Labs should be mandatory for any company putting messages out in to the world. It is essential to put out these fires before they get out of control.

We have been widening access to the Scout Labs beta application over the last few months and will be adding a lot more companies more quickly, now. There are over one hundred companies using the application right now, and we will be adding dozens more each week. The reason for the delay? We are in beta for one reason: to get high quality feedback so that we can optimize the product prior to commercial launch (early 2009). We have needed to manage the number of companies in the app closely to make sure we have the resources to monitor usage, answer questions, and have conversations with each company to get the detailed feedback we need. Now, with a bigger customer service team and more automation (web-based survey, better internal usage metrics, feedback buttons throughout the app which automatically go into a bug-tracking queue for our product teams’ review, etc.), we are able to bring companies on more quickly. We will get to everyone on the waiting list eventually, but, gratefully, it is a very long list, so feel free to remind us of your continued interest, either here or in an email to beta <at> scoutlabs <dot> com.

We know many of you have been waiting for a long time and we thank you for your patience.

No one within range of a TV, radio or computer could have missed seeing recent news about last week’s vicious paramilitary attacks on civilians throughout Mumbai. There was a great deal of footage from the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which as one of Mumbai’s flagship luxury hotels was targeted for attack as a symbol of India’s amicable relationship with the modern (and Western) world. I took a look at the most frequent words appearing in a Taj Hotels search today and found:

• Terrorists
• Hostages
• Attacks
• Police
• Armed
• Killed
• Gunmen
• Fire
• Dead

How sad. The top words pre-attack were:

• India
• Indian
• Luxury
• Mumbai
• Hotel
• Business
• Guests
• Palace
• New

Taj Hotels has put up a special site with press releases, contacts, and help for guests- phone numbers to call, a procedure for retrieving bags, priority service for getting back passports. There are also denials of employee involvement, blustery statements about rebuilding, and promises to take care of employees who were injured in the attack or are out of work as a result of it. No one could reasonably have expected to defend a bustling luxury hotel in a peaceful civil society from a full scale military attack. Nevertheless the Taj group is going to have to spend a lot of time and money dealing with the impact to the operations and to their brand.

I wonder if they realize that one of the best ways for them to acknowledge and cope with this tragedy are to let their affected guests, employees, and employee’s families testify as to what went on in the hotel during the attack — and how the Taj Group handled them afterwards. If they can exemplify the values of compassion, service, and dignity, this tragedy need not be the swansong for this landmark hotel.