Sonic Foundry’s User Conference Wins Prestigious Social Media Award
UNLEASH 2009 energizes Mediasite users on-site and online
MADISON, Wis. - December 3, 2009 - Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, was honored for its success with UNLEASH 2009, the Mediasite User Conference with a 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award in the Business-to-Business Energizing category. 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 will discuss how it created the groundswell campaign during a complimentary live webinar Tuesday, December 8 at 1:00 central. Registration is free at www.sonicfoundry.com/register/groundswell.
The Forrester Groundswell Awards recognize excellence in achieving business and organizational goals with social technology applications. The awards program was developed to support and recognize the principles outlined in the Forrester Research book Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008).
"Every year the quality of business social applications improves, facilitating sophisticated outreach techniques and novel marketing strategies," said Josh Bernoff, Senior Vice President, Idea Development at Forrester and coauthor of Groundswell. "This year's winners stood out in a very competitive field; all of them demonstrate not just creative use of social technologies, but impressive, measurable results."
"The Mediasite User Group now boasts almost 1000 members and the annual user conference is one of the biggest physical gatherings of these users globally. While attendance has consistently grown, we recognized this year we needed to take the conference to users who couldn't attend because of travel bans and budget constraints," said Erica St. Angel, vice president of marketing at Sonic Foundry. "By webcasting every session and launching social media sites where customers could network with us and each other, we increased both attendance and conference satisfaction, and built online relationships between users that are still active today."
This year, there were more than 140 entries to the Forrester Groundswell Awards. Winners were chosen in Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) divisions across a number of categories. More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at: www.forrester.com/groundswell. Sonic Foundry's 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award submission is also available at World of Webcast.
About Sonic Foundry ®, Inc.
Sonic Foundry (NASDAQ: SOFO, www.sonicfoundry.com) is the
global leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, providing enterprise communication
solutions for more than 1,600 customers in education, business and government. Powered by Mediasite,
the patented webcasting platform which automates the capture, management, delivery and search of
lectures, online training and briefings, Sonic Foundry empowers people to transform the way they
communicate. Through the Mediasite platform and its Events Services group, the company helps customers
connect a dynamic, evolving world of shared knowledge and envisions a future where learners and workers
around the globe use webcasting to bridge time and distance, accelerate research and improve performance.
Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of Sonic Foundry, Inc. or their
respective owners.
Certain statements contained in this news release regarding matters that are not
historical facts may be forward-looking statements. Because such forward-looking
statements include risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially
from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that
could cause actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to,
uncertainties pertaining to continued market acceptance for Sonic Foundry's products,
its ability to succeed in capturing significant revenues from media services and/or
systems, the effect of new competitors in its market, integration of acquired business
and other risk factors identified from time to time in its filings with the Securities
and Exchange Commission.