According to Chris Cardell, you don't need professional video production companies like us to make your business videos, you can do it yourself. And the thing is, I agree with him.

Let me set the scene. Along with 700 other business owners, I attended the Chris Cardell Entrepreneur Summit last weekend to mug up on the latest online marketing trends. And to be fair, Chris certainly didn't disappoint. There was plenty of new stuff on pay per click, which is where I think his strength really lies, and some new material about remarketing and Facebook. Chris is a leading authority on marketing for small businesses and start-ups, and I'm prepared to take onboard what he has to say. 

What I really wanted to know was what Chris thought about online video. And the good news was that he thought that every small business should now be using it on their websites. Hooray! In fact, online video was to be the recurring theme of the summit, and with our own new short form videos (Spectrevids) about to be launched, it was good to hear. It was obvious to me that Chris had excellent marketing foresight – I listened intently. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was to be short-lived. Smug self-satisfaction turned to horror as Chris went on to recommend that owners of small businesses should avoid expensive video production companies and go out and make their own videos instead. And guest speaker Paul McKenna agreed. Mind you, Paul is a renowned self-help expert, so you'd expect him to declare DIY videos a no-brainer!

User Generated Content (UGC as its known) has the advantage of being cheap, immediate and authentic. In fact, despite a bombardment of different marketing approaches, I only signed up to a Chris Cardell Entrepreneur Summit after being convinced by one of his videos. He gave a straight 20 minute presentation in front of a locked-off camera, no cutaways, and such was his natural style and power of persuasion that I was instantly drawn in. You see, for the first time, I knew what I'd be getting if I attended one of his summits. If the speaker's good enough, then a raw, user-generated video can achieve that. I've seen quite large organisations sending their employees out with Flip cameras to record 'a day in the life' scenarios as part of a recruitment drive, and only this week I was suggesting that a charity should record their overseas projects in this way. The homemade video looks honest and uncontrived in a way that slick production values could never hope to imitate. It's also true that if you need to post a lot of videos on your site, especially if it's required on a recurring basis, then you'll probably need to produce your own out of sheer economic necessity. And if your product is homemade, then there's a certain allure if your videos are too.

So does that mean that I need to look for another job? Well, not quite. Most of us have a relative or friend who can work out of a bedroom and knock up a website, but would we want them to do ours? It depends on your business of course, but if you want SEO, distinctive branding, a good CMS, in other words, a professional website, then you'd probably want professional help too. And the same goes for video production. There's no shortage of people who think that as long as you've bought an HD video camera, then your video's pretty much in the bag. Wrong! The invention of crayons didn't put artists out of business, and cheap cameras won't do likewise for professional videographers (it should, however, enable them to reduce their prices!).

Say you run a small hotel and you want a video on your home page (as well as on other online travel sites). If the video looks amateur, how's that going to make your hotel look? So to give yourself a fighting chance, you buy a half-decent HD camera. Then you discover that you need a few extras like a tripod, lights and microphone. Remember, you're doing this yourself because you want to save money, so you're going to be doing quite a bit of shopping around to get the best deal, right? Now you need to learn how to use your new kit proficiently. Do you know how to compose a shot, light a room, interview your general manager? You will also need to spend time learning new software so that you can edit your material into a slick promotional tool; you will have to choose some royalty-cleared music; and you will have to know how to place your video into a media player and upload it onto a number of different websites. It can take professional videographers years to learn how to put great-looking films together, but you could certainly give it a go. Even if it turns out you’re the next Spielberg, think how long all of this would take, and what that time is worth to you. How much would it be worth to have someone else do the work so that you can do something far more productive, something that you're really good at, something that only you can do?

So in conclusion, it's absolutely fine to make your own videos if the rough and ready presentation style lends itself to your message. But from a marketing and branding point of view, it's probably not going to be fine if you want a professional-looking video that's going to support and reflect your online identity.

I think Chris really gets why video is so important for small businesses and understands how it should be used. But he’s a marketing expert, not a film producer, and he can’t teach his audience how video communicates, and how it can influence people’s thinking and change their behaviour, because frankly he hasn’t had the experience. That experience has to be won after years of practice, and years of exposure to different business models and ideas. For that reason, I think that video production companies will be providing an important business service for some time to come.