One of the ways to spruce up your survey and make it more interesting to your respondents is to incorporate multimedia into the survey. Incorporating video clips into your survey is a cinch and something which is quite impractical with more traditional survey methods. i.e. can you imagine the cost of sending out a DVD with every mail survey.

There are a number of options to consider when incorporating video into your survey. One of the easiest and most straightforward ways is to use an external video hosting service like YouTube Another option is to host the video on your own server.

Recently when conducting a survey we had to make a decision on how to incorporate a video into a survey and we decided on Google Video The reason for this was we found that Google Video allowed the most flexibility. We were able to restrict access to the video and it gave a far cleaner user experience.

YouTube failed the test due to the fact that if the user clicked on the video they were then taken through to the YouTube site, hardly ideal halfway through the survey. Also at the end of the YouTube video it gives the viewer options of related videos to watch – also not ideal, we don’t want to distract our respondents while they are taking the survey. Now it may be possible that some of these YouTube functions can be managed (i,e turned off) but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

So, Google Video in my mind is a pretty safe choice for getting videos into your surveys.  I would love to hear of others though.