Philip Bliss and I were at the eduweb conference once again this year,  and were also happy to be a gold sponsor of the conference, as well as to present "SkoolPool: Energizing Applicants with Facebook and OpenSocial" on the final day of the conference. I was also invited to sit in on an open panel on Wednesday  that covered some very neat topics (can commercial cookie-cutter approaches to branding really be applied to higher ed?).

Our presentation covered SkoolPool's first year in beta:

• Students listing schools on their profiles
• Passed 10,000+ overall signups in Spring 2008
• 5,000+ current users
• Meet Future Classmates feature added to duplicate Class of 2012 functionality, launched Spring 2008

Phil ran the crowd through our research findings from the first year, as well as our plans for research reporting with v2.0 - including some very exciting views such as cross applications to your top 5 competitors, and conversion from "Considering" to "Applying", and "Received an Offer" to "Accepted Offer."

I went through the case study of launching a social media application to the higher ed applicant demographic. Our greatest success was with planted "word-of-mouth" marketing on higher ed- related Facebook and MySpace groups and profiles. Our first day of the WOM campaign saw 42% growth in SkoolPool's population! We also reviewed Facebook Social Ads and Google AdWords as possible marketing tools - albeit very briefly.

The most exciting bit for us was finally being able to unveil what is coming with the big Fall 2008 launch. We encourage as many institutions as possible to sign up for our free profile package before the launch, in order to benefit from the traffic we plan to generate with the launch campaign. SkoolPool v2.0 will be multiplatform (MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Facebook) and will aggregate students across all participating networks. For example, a Facebook user can see their MySpace friends who are considering the same schools as them. SkoolPool.com is being rebuilt as a "social hub" for higher ed applicants, allowing students to interact with SkoolPool purely on the www instead of having to go through a social networking site. The new SkoolPool.com will include profiles for all of the 7,044 schools listed in the SkoolPool database - each with video, stats, forums and reviews/rankings.

Our presentation will be made available online shortly, along with a recorded video stream taken by the always awesome @sayitaintjonas.