Sonic Foundry and Zerista Combine Streaming, Content Management and Networking to Create Hybrid Events and Community

Sonic Foundry stared out providing digital media editing tools and sold that business to Sony in 2003 and they have been focused on webcasting full-time since.

“We now have an Event Services Division that uses the technology we created,” said Erica St. Angel, VP Marketing, Sonic Foundry. “So we not only build the hardware and the software but also take that technology out in the field and capture events for our clients.”

The Events Services Division grew out of Sonic’s existing client base. The early clients were people who bought Sonic’s technology and installed it behind their firewalls or in their university or were a third party that built their own business model around Sonic’s products. “We found clients asking us to come in to support their hosting. They might be doing a graduation ceremony where they’re going to have 10,000 people hit the system at one time. Or, they had a multi-room, multi-day event and needed support to capture all those rooms at the same time. That business actually reached a critical mass where we realized we needed to be doing this full time,” explained St. Angel.

The primary focus for the division is producing hybrid events where their clients are coming together face-to-face and also having an online audience that they want to reach. Of course, they want to be able to go back and consume the content on-demand as well.

“We believe very strongly in the power of video,” said St. Angel. And that’s a key differentiator in terms of our player. People want that personal feeling that you’re watching someone and someone’s watching and interacting with you, that comes from straight-on camera shot video.”

“Clients put a lot of planning into their events and they pay attention to detail; to the experience and they want it captured and displayed properly. It is a reason why people choose our platform; because of how polished the interface is and also how customizable it is for their brand.”

Though Sonic is seeing a growing demand for streaming, they are also seeing events and publications that want to market their content after it’s been captured. Clients are using the content to entice people back to the conference website or are using it as a tool to upgrade membership. Their content management and the reporting tools help prove the ROI, showing for example, who watched the content, how long did they watched it, who they shared it with, and much more.

“The majority of our clients are using an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution, and they don’t require any customization in terms of coding.” said St. Angel. “We supply templates that they can choose from to lay out their content catalogue. We also allow them to embed the content within their website or conference pages. And that’s where we could see some custom development being needed.”

“On the other end of the spectrum is something like Autodesk University where they’ve built their captured content into their web experience. The actual presentation is sitting there on their webpage and all of that data is feeding back to their hosted servers so that they can get reports on how many people watched. That is using the Silverlight players that are embedded.”
Sonic Foundry is seeing growth outside of hybrid events as well with more of a traditional virtual event where the audience is entirely online. They are still capturing what’s happening in a physical room or studio where the person is speaking but the people who are watching are all online.

“We had a webcast in Brazil for example, where H1N1 has exploded and the pharmaceutical company didn’t want to bring all of their people in for training or for their sales meeting. So, they brought the speakers and their executive team in and then webcasted them out to about a thousand sales people. Recently, we’ve seen more activity in that regards,” noted St. Angel.
In addition to quality issues and the steep learning curve with capture and streaming, the difference using someone like Sonic Foundry or just posting content to YouTube is control over the content in terms of where it goes, who sees it and if something needs to be changed or taken down, for whatever reason it can be. A lot of corporations, associations and universities are concerned about access and control over their content.

“We had a few occasions where the client was planning to just send a staffer to the session with a video camera and just tape it and put it up on the web. And what they realized was the process of doing that was complex. It’s tough because the quality does make a difference in how often people are going to come back and how much they’ll share it and how much they value it. The video is important but people will tolerate bad video. They will not tolerate bad audio though and audio is often the harder part. They’ll drop off if they can’t hear the sound well. And when the room is dark and the slides aren’t readable people will also drop off. It’s really unfortunate when you have tried the do-it-yourself approach and it didn’t work so well because it’s harder to make the sell to your board, boss or to the event planning committee to do it again because nobody watched it or those that did didn’t like it,” said St. Angel.

Sonic recently announced they are working with Zerista, Inc. an event management platform software provider. Zerista started out as a conference social networking solution and quickly branched into registration and now provides a full suite of solutions including virtual events. With Sonic’s streaming platform and embedding technology, Zerista can now produce live hybrid events on their platform.

Zerista’s focus is on creating a “private” event networking experience where you’re harnessing the power of all the social media options available into one location within your event but it is not open to just anyone. “A LinkedIn or Facebook profile is ok in general, but for a specific event, people want to supplement that with information that is more relevant to the topics and attendees of that event,” said John Kanarowski, President of Zerista. “So in addition to connecting with the most popular social networking and social media tools, we offer a closed, private network for events.”

The Zerista platform benefits the attendee, the exhibitor, the sponsor and the event producer. The system allows the event producer to manage speakers, exhibitors and attendees in one environment while allowing the exhibitor/sponsor to self-manage their event exposure with a virtual booth, automated booth selection and uploading of needed graphics and promotional materials—including rich media. Attendees use the system to register and build their custom profile as well as manage their social media, and agenda builder. Speakers can upload their session description, photo, bio, presentations as well as their social media preferences. All participants can use the chat feature as well as profile search and matching.