Secrets to Success Deborah Cole Micek and John-Paul Micek

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Flip Video is great for online videos

I've got the best gift suggestion for that special someone who is developing their marketing with new media. It's the easiest way to use online video in new-media marketing and it's fast, cheap and fun!

The business side benefit? Using video to bond with your tribe boosts your emotional bonding.

This is the perfect gift for someone who's been shying away from using video because they think its complex or costly. If that special person is more experienced at recording with an expensive HD camera, this is a "must have" tool for them too!

When it comes to capturing video for new-media marketing, there's a new king on the block for simplicity: the Flip Video recorder, from Pure Digital Technologies. This tiny little recorder (the size of a pack of cards) holds 60 minutes of digital video. Quality is more than sufficient for Web use, and it even looks good on a regular TV.

We've been testing the new Flip Video in normal recording situations, and we also tested it to see how quickly it would adapt to rapid light changes and high-speed movement. It doesn't disappoint. However, the online transcoding on YouTube does it no justice. In this case, Revver (a site similar to YouTube) is better.

In raw format, and even on Revver, it did a good a job at color and light adjustment under demanding situations. Surprisingly, it performed as well as our $2,000 Sony HD camera. You can really see the lush greens of the mountains and deep blues of the ocean -- even at high speed.

In my opinion, Flip Video is one of the best bang-for-your-buck purchases you can make. At around $150 online, Flip Video is a "must have" for anyone serious about new-media marketing.

Here's what friends have told me about Flip Video:

» "The Flip Video is so easy to use with very good picture quality. For unknown reasons I am not able to import the Flip Video AVI files into Sony Vegas Movie Studio to do editing. There is something on my Vaio desktop that is creating a codec issue which I cannot figure out for the life of me. But the Flip Video is well worth the money!"

» " ... Re: the Sony Vegas import issue: We have the same problem on our Dell workstations. A quick conversion from AVI to WMV solves that issue, if editing is needed. Hopefully a fix will come out for this issue soon."

» "Someone told me about this camera a couple of months ago and I've left major hints ... more than hints ... to my husband that this would look nice under the Christmas tree."

If you end up with this gift under your tree, please let me know how you use it to boost your tribal seduction and new-media marketing. If you already have a Flip Video, what are you doing with it to have fun and bond with your tribe? Drop me a note and share your ideas.