Sonic Foundry Featured in New Book Empowered

MADISON, Wis. – September 20, 2010 – Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, today announced the company is featured in the new book, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press), written by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler of independent research firm, Forrester Research, Inc.

Published this week, Empowered provides real-world examples of innovative companies and leaders who use technologies such as social, mobile, video and the internet to solve customer problems. Last year, Sonic Foundry won the Forrester Groundswell Award in the Business-to-Business Energizing category for its success with UNLEASH 2009, the Mediasite User Conference. The conference achieved recognition for an integrated campaign that successfully leveraged online video, webcasts via Mediasite, email and social media to increase attendance by 15 percent in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Sonic Foundry’s story is featured in chapter 6 of the new book.

“Sonic Foundry took advantage of its strength with video to record and broadcast interviews with members at the conference, and to Webcast the entire event. By featuring users (and retweeting their tweets), the company spread the enthusiasm of a live event to many who weren’t there in person,” writes Bernoff and Schadler in Empowered (Harvard Business Review Press; September 2010) on page 102.

“The annual conference of the Mediasite User Group remains the largest physical gathering of these users globally. While attendance has consistently grown each year, we recognized in 2009 that the changing economic conditions would potentially have a significant impact on the ability of our customers to attend on-site,” said Erica St. Angel, vice president of marketing at Sonic Foundry. “To help them overcome budget cuts and travel bans, we took the conference to them, online. Sonic Foundry Event Services webcast every session via our platform Mediasite, and we launched social media sites where customers could network with us and each other. The result was increased attendance, conference satisfaction, revenue and lasting relationships between users that are still active today. We’re honored to be recognized among the companies highlighted by the Empowered authors as a reproducible example of how to energize a user base.”