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Just because it's cheap doesn't make it good.  Likewise, just because it's inexpensive and easy to do doesn't mean it's effective.

It really wasn't that long ago when America's Funniest Home Videos debuted and became of television's top shows.  A camcorder and a child without impulse control was all it took to make you a star.  Cut to present day and the advent of pocket-sized video cameras, and the marvel of modern video sharing called YouTube.  Anyone with a $149 video camera or an iPhone can become an overnight viral video sensation.

Web video and social media have been booming in recent years, and with that comes enormous opportunity for businesses to supplement their traditional media marketing plans for practically peanuts.  But again... just because it's cheap and easy, it doesn't mean it's effective.  In fact, it may just make your brand look... cheap.  Handheld video cameras are designed to be drop dead simple to use, but the resulting video is often plagued with annoying shakiness, unintelligible sound, poor lighting and other distracting artifacts.  

I've been producing audio and video for over ten years.  Trust me... not a day goes by without a video invading my Twitter stream that makes me cringe for a business' brand identity.  Think about some of the social media videos you've seen lately.  How many times have you come to a business' video and turned it off because you couldn't understand what the subject was saying, or the handheld shakiness made you queasy.

Harnessing the power of inexpensive web video comes with some pitfalls that can be easily avoided with a few simple tips.

Sound.  Good sound is one of the most overlooked aspects to social media videos.  Even though many modern consumer-grade video cameras and cell phones come with flashy 1080p high-definition video capabilities, the microphone on these devices leaves much to be desired.  Even if the microphone is good, chances are you may be standing too far away from the camera to record good quality sound.  You may also pick up a great deal of distracting noise from moving the camera around, ambient noise in your environment, or even the wind blowing by.

In short, never trust the microphone on the camera to give you good audio.  If you don't already have a handheld video camera, look for one with an external microphone jack.  Kodak's Zi8 and Aiptek's Action HD GVS models feature such jacks, which allow you to plug in a microphone with a 1/8" stereo "minijack" connector.  There are many inexpensive microphones that can be paired with these cameras, including ATR-3350 lapel mic by Audio-Technica.  This microphone is a "condenser" style microphone, and is powered by a small watch battery compartment.  Self powered microphones like this give work great with handheld cameras and give rich, professional sound.  A $25 microphone like this can make all the difference in quality of your social media videos.  If I can't hear what you're saying, all you have to show for your efforts is an 8-minute YouTube video of you flapping your gums.

If you don't have a camera with an external microphone jack, there are things you can do to improve the sound quality of your videos.  Put your camera on a tripod to cut down on the handling noise transferred from your hand to the camera.  Shoot your videos in a place with as little ambient noise as possible.  Best of all, speak as clearly as possible without all-out shouting.  That doesn't look good either!

Shakiness.  Watching some video taken with handheld cameras can be as nauseating as standing on the deck of a ship navigating rough seas.  Documentary-style may be en vogue on TV and film these days, but done incorrectly, you may just churn your viewers stomaches.  Your videos will look much more professional if you can make your camera as steady as possible, whether that's setting it on a table or attaching it to a tripod.  Tripods can be found rather inexpensively these days at most electronics and camera stores, and most handheld cameras will have tripod shoes on the bottom of the unit.

If you want to go for the handheld look, or you need to move the camera around, you can improvise a "steady-cam" rig using an inexpensive tripod.  This works best with tripods which have an extendable neck between the head of the tripod and the legs.  First, attach the camera to the tripod, then extend the neck of the tripod out, if equipped with one.  Next, spread the legs of the tripod out, but don't extend the legs.  Then all you have to do is hold the tripod by the top of the neck.  Depending on the weight of the camera and tripod, this may be somewhat fatiguing after a while, but the counterweight of the tripod's spread legs will drastically smooth out any sudden and distracting shakiness.

Lighting.  If you want to do video and can't spend thousands of dollars on a professional video camera, chances are you won't spend money on a lighting package to go with your $150 Flip camera.  Unfortunately, the light sensors built into pocket cameras and cell phones are not designed for a wide array of lighting situations.  In most cases, however, you don't need to spend time and money on lighting.  Just keep a few things in mind.

First, silhouettes are not your friend.  Be mindful where you position your camera in relation to your subject and the landscape behind them.  Putting a subject in front of a window on a bright sunny day will make them look like dark, shadowy figures in the middle of nuclear winter.  Position your subjects away from very bright backgrounds, and in a place where there is enough light to illuminate your subjects.

If you find yourself recording in a place with less-than-ideal lighting, be aware of how it will affect your video.  Sensors in inexpensive video cameras have very small surfaces, and are more often than not very poor in low light situations.  If you must shoot in low light, try to keep your camera as still as possible.  Even better, use a tripod.  Sometimes these cameras automatically compensate for low light, and that gives motion in those videos a "strobe-like" quality that may look weird.  If your camera features a 60 frames-per-second mode or an optical image stablization feature, use it!

HD or no HD?  Many newer video cameras and cell phones shoot high-definition video, some even shooting in eye-popping 1080p.  But is the highest resolution always best?  In most cases, a well thought out video trumps a glitzy 1080p video done poorly.  You may also find that your computer may not be powerful enough to edit or play back 1080p video.  Unless you're intending to put out a Blu-ray disc of your production down the road, usually 720p is plenty.  You'll probably find it looks just as good on YouTube at 720p as 1080p, and you may encounter less headaches working with it.  Even if your camera doesn't do HD, a well-planned and executed standard-definition video can go a long way toward improving your brand image.

What to say?  Some people are naturally better at speaking in public than others, and being on camera is no different.  If you tend to ramble or have difficulty putting together thoughts on the fly, turning a camera on may only amplify this.  You don't have to write a screenplay or draw out a storyboard for your whole project, but there's no shame in jotting down an outline or a short script to help keep you focused.  Knowing what you want to say or how you want to portray your message beforehand will tighten up your video and make your video infinitely more watchable.

Post-production.  If you're struggling to afford a $150 video camera, adding an additional cost for editing software seems like the straw that broke the camel's back.  Many cameras come with very rudimentary editing software, but it's often too difficult to use or gives poor results.  If you want to give your videos a little something extra, there are many inexpensive full-featured video editing suites that can be purchased for less than $100.  You can add photos, logos, text and other great effects to your video to give it a professional flair.  You can even add music, but be careful not to use commercial music in your videos.  Copyright holders don't take kindly to that, and YouTube is making it easier for them to find videos that feature their music without licenses.

My favorite line is the Vegas Movie Studio line from Sony.  It is based on an award-winning professional production suite, but simplified and redesigned for the consumer social media maven.  There are a few "flavors" of Vegas Movie Studio ranging between $40 and $100, and it features many great tools for video and audio editing, as well as DVD creation.  They're even designed to output your videos directly to YouTube and Facebook.  There are many other software packages along the same lines, including Adobe Premiere Elements and Corel Video Studio.

Summary.  Cheap video cameras and sites like YouTube have leveled the playing field, giving everyone the opportunity to become a social media celebrity.  The opportunity to engage your audience and recruit more customers using social media videos is virtually limitless, and more affordable than ever.  The power to connect with your customers using clever and well thought out social media videos isn't all that difficult, but keeping these tips in mind can help your video stand out and grab your viewers' attention.

I'm not an auto mechanic.

Whatever savvy I may have with technology, I admittedly lack that saavy when it comes to anything remotely automotive.  With the luck I've had in past with cars, I would consider myself an automotive hypochondriac.  For me, finding a trustworthy auto mechanic is a valuable thing, and I thought I had in Tuffy Auto in Appleton.

Right away, they had two major things going for them -- they were across the street from my job, and I got a company discount for them.  Over the past couple years, they were my go-to people for oil changes and other things that may have cropped up along the way.  Their prices seemed reasonable, and they seemed candid and knowledgeable in explaining necessary repairs.

Cut to about a month ago, and my wife's broken blinkers.  As we had taken our car to Tuffy for almost everything, she didn't hesitate to schedule an appointment on my behalf for her car when her turn signals suddenly stopped working.  We had thought it might be something as simple as a fuse, but as neither of us have ever needed to replace a fuse, we thought it best for them to at the very least check it out.

We took it over to Tuffy in the morning and left it there all day, as had been the usual routine since I worked across the street.  I waited longer and longer throughout the day for a call with a diagnosis and an estimate.  Come 5:00 and still no call, which I thought was a bit disconcerting as they close at 6:00 and without a car, I have no way to get back to Green Bay.  I walk over and they said they hadn't even worked up my estimate yet, and they would call in about ten minutes to let me know.  Fourty minutes later, they call and said it was a bad turn signal switch and they would order a part.  

I did some research online and found that new replacement turn signal switches typically ran upwards of $400 or more.  In order to keep the costs somewhat south of obscene, they were going to try to find a used part at a salvage yard.  Flash forward to two weeks later and they finally found one that worked in Fond Du Lac.  The salvage yard took it out of their car, put it into a test car and it worked.  The part was to be here by the appointment we made for a Thursday before we went out of town, but when I arrived for the appointment, they said the yard had sent the wrong part.  By wrong part, they meant it wasn't a turn signal, and definitely not for this car.  So we had to take my minivan out of town, and we spent more on gas than we would have liked.  It was either that or drive 6 hours to Minnesota without blinkers.

The next week, they had switched out the part and I brought the car in to finally get this resolved.  I left the car all day again, and yet again the entire work day progressed without so much as a phone call saying how things were going.  I wrapped up my workday and wandered across the street to see my car in the garage with the hood open.  This was, unfortunately, not the first time I had encountered this after business hours on a day I left my car all day with Tuffy.  They told me that the new (well, new to me) part wasn't working and they were trying to diagnose if it was the part or something with the car.  They figured it was something wrong with the part and they raced to put the old switch back in while I sat in their lobby watching Animal Planet.

After some profuse apologies -- another in a long and tedious string of apologies throughout this now nearly month-long torturous process -- the manager asked if we wanted to try continuing to find a salvage part or go for new.  I discussed with my wife who, along with me, were already disgusted over the never-ending timeline of this process and the non-existent line of communication between the shop and us.  We called around to other shops to see how much replacing a turn signal switch would be, and found other shops well north of the $300-500 parts-and-labor range Tuffy had given us, so we thought we should stick it out with them and just go for a new part.  "Let's get this the hell over with," I thought, as I told them to find us the cheapest new part available.  The manager said he'd let me know by end of day what he could find, and I'd bring the car in when the part came.

A few business days later, still no call from Tuffy.  At this point, poor communication seemed to be very much the norm, so it became a matter of keeping on top of the communication process.  I dropped in on a Tuesday to find out what the status was, to which he replied it was backordered, possibly to be available by Friday.  I asked if a more expensive part could be had sooner.  After making a call to a local dealer, he said a part could be had the next day, but it would have been $500+ versus the $380 or so for the backordered part.  We thought since we've already pissed away this much time driving around dangerously-bereft of blinkers, what's another few days when it could mean the price difference of obscene versus grossly obscene.

The next day, I had to drive my wife's car because she was going into a part of town where construction was happening, and it was going to be safer for her to drive my van with blinkers.  The whole process of this drawn-out debacle with Tuffy had been festering for over a month now, and I got to thinking something just didn't seem right.  Of the complicated, expensive turn signal apparatus, only the turn signals ceased working.  The hazards, wipers and cruise control all worked.  Why would a part work in a car in the junkyard but not in our vehicle?  My mind wandered back to the fuse idea.  Perhaps it was apathy or my lack of car knowledge that hindered me from trying this before, but I decided to wander over to the auto parts store to try a four-dollar hunch that it was a blown fuse.  I procured a pack of new fuses, located the fuse panel inside the glove compartment and found the turn signal fuse.  Upon inspecting with with my untrained eye, it definitely looked like the filament inside had come undone, if not physically burned out.  I popped in a new fuse, turned on the car and magically (or maybe not so magically), the signals worked perfectly.  I even took a windy stretch of roads back to work to ensure they continued to operate.

I called my wife and told her the news, and we collectively sighed a sigh of relief knowing that we wouldn't be spending a big wad of our emergency fund, throwing good money after bad.  I walked into Tuffy and told them to cancel the part as our signals worked again.  Shocked, the guy asked if they just started working.  I pulled out the old fuse and a new one to show him side-by-side.  "Amazing," he exclaimed, before offering up more profuse apologies as I walked out the door for the final time, intent on never returning.

Again, I'm not a mechanic, and I know that realistically the fuse should have been something I checked myself before taking it in for service to begin with, but I would have thought a seemingly reputable auto repair outfit with ASE-certified technicians would have been able to diagnose a blown fuse before even taking apart the steering column.  Whether or not this was a vast oversight or an intended deceit to steer us toward a costlier repair, I can't say.  I will say that if the technicians and/or management of Tuffy aren't shady, they're grossly incompetent at the very least.

A fuse costs mere pennies versus the hundreds it would have cost to replace the turn signal switch assembly.  Even if you charge $30 for diagnosis and a dollar for a replacement switch, you would have come out ahead in the end by ensuring a customer's continued trust in your word and your automotive expertise.  You may not have made as much commission or labor fees in the end, but I would have kept bringing our cars back because I trusted you to steer us in the right direction.  I feel awful having to dissolve a business relationship over a simple 60-cent fuse, but trust is a valuable thing to an automotive neophyte like myself, and that's something you can't put a price on.