OK, I know this post is a bit late, but here goes anyway. I don't have Maya in front of me now so I might not remember the items in the menus exactly.

This method assumes when you created the Soft Body the options were: Duplicate make copy soft, and check hide non-soft and make non-soft object a goal.

Your emitting particles should have a radial field attatched to them.

Get your emitter from the object window and in the channel box set Apply per vertex to on.

Select your particles and radial field and Make the selected object source of field, that way each partice emmits its own radial field. You may need to reduce the max distance of the radial since you're dealing with small particles, depending on the effect you're going for.

In the dynamics relationship window attatch the radial field to the particles of your soft body object.

If you don't want you're emitting particles to penetrate the soft body, then make the soft body a collision object and connect it to the emitting particles in the Dynamic Relationship editor.

Then all you have to do is play with the goal value of the soft body particle, max distance, magnitude to get the effect you want.

You can also smooth the deformation by using springs on the soft body particles if you want (wireframe mode & walklenght = 2, and play with the stiffness and damping variables).

I'll be happy to show a sample scene file, however it's a version 4.5 file ony. I don't know how to convert to 4.0 if that's what you have.
Hope that gives you some idea.