Sparkroom announced two very important milestones today. Firstly, and most importantly, we announced that Premier Education Group (PEG) is now working with Sparkroom. PEG’s brands include Branford Hall Career Institute, Salter College, The Salter School, Seacoast Career Schools, Suburban Technical School and Harris School of Business. We are thrilled to be working with Tony McPeck and his team and are excited to help them solve some of their most pressing sales & marketing issues.

Secondly, we are pleased to announce Sparkroom Lead Deliver, which PEG is implementing. Lead Deliver performs real-time lead capture, scrubbing and distribution and is integrated with leading CRM platforms in the EDU vertical. Tony captured the essence of the product when he said:

“We have always managed our vendor relationships in-house but we have lacked a technology platform that can aggregate, validate and distribute our leads quickly and efficiently. We selected Sparkroom Lead Deliver to solve those problems.”

See the press release here.  We look forward to a great partnership with PEG and to continued adoption of the Lead Deliver product in the marketplace.

We ran a webinar on May 14 called “How To Take Control of Your Online Lead Generation”. We discussed how marketers in higher education can utilize software to automate lead delivery and gain business intelligence across all of their online and offline marketing channels, and covered best practices for developing media plans, managing vendors, and evaluating performance.

Thanks to all those who participated. If anyone would like to listen to a recording of the webinar, simply email us at events@sparkroom.com and we will reply with a link.

I spent last Tuesday at BMO’s Marketing and Advertising Thought Leaders conference. Thanks to Pete Stack and Jeff Silber from BMO Capital Markets for the invitation to attend and sit on the EDU panel. Anna Maria Virzi from ClickZ covered the day here.

I shared the stage on the EDU marketing panel with some of the smartest folks in EDU lead gen. The panel was moderated by Jeff Silber and included Michael Platt from Plattform, Doug Brown from All-Star, Greg O’Brien from CollegeBound, and Steve Isaac from Education Dynamics. My notes from the panel:

* for-profit education is counter-cyclical as all of the companies on the panel talked about growing budgets

* there will be a flight to quality as schools increasingly choose the larger, better converting lead providers. Sparkroom tends to agree with this conclusion and hopes that Lead IQ is part of every school’s plan to get smarter about marketing and enrollment

* the not-for-profit universities are going to start marketing more like the career colleges over the next decade; I am not sure about this one — someone on the panel mentioned that Penn State, UMass and University of Maryland have all built large and successful online education divisions — I think it is going to take more than 10 years for a marketing and customer acquisition ethos to permeate the culture of the not-for-profit university

* all the panelists talked about regulation risk — particularly as it relates to the Department of Education regulating marketing education to potential students. One of the panelists did the quick math - $40B in for-profit EDU revenue, 25% of revenue spend on sales & marketing and 80% of the revenue comes from Title IV funding. Ergo, the Department of Education is spending $8B every year (through career colleges) marketing education.

I learned a ton over the course of the day and met some great digital marketing companies. Thanks again BMO for the invite.

We will be exhibiting at the Career College Association 2009 Annual Convention in Orlando, Florida. The show looks great and we are excited to be part of it this year. Come by and visit us in booth #114 to meet the team and see our products in action. We hope to see you there.

Join us on May 14 at 2pm EST. We’ll be discussing how schools can utilize software to automate lead delivery and gain business intelligence across all of your online and offline marketing channels. Improve your marketing efficiency, boost profitability, and better manage your vendors. Get details and register here. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Earlier this year, we launched Lead IQ for the education vertical. Yesterday, we announced a milestone relationship for our company with U.S. Education, which operates its schools under the Apollo College and Western Career College brands and is a division of DeVry Inc. We met Jason and Andy earlier this year and were immediately impressed by them as smart direct marketers and business people. The good news for us is they liked what Lead IQ could do for them. Andy said it best in the press release: “By implementing the Lead IQ platform, we expect to make better business decisions and drive increased operational efficiency, ultimately allowing us to scale our business more quickly.”

We look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with US Ed.

We will be demoing some new product at LeadsCon (www.leadscon.com) next week in Las Vegas. The show begins Wednesday, March 4th and ends Thursday, March 5th. We are being featured in the Private Company Spotlight on Wednesday, March 4th at 11:45 AM. Looking forward to catching up with the industry next week.

Our first webinar happened yesterday, Monday, February 2nd. Thanks to all those who participated. If anyone would like to listen to a recording of the webinar, simply email us at events@sparkroom.com and we will reply with a link.Thanks.

Sparkroom is doing our first webinar in the higher education space. Get details and register here. The date is Groundhog Day - February 2, 2009 at 2 PM EST. Looking forward to sharing our EDU platform with you then.

UPDATE: Thank you to those who attended the webinar. For those who missed the live event, simply email events@sparkroom.com for a link to a recording of the webinar.

Nine months ago, we announced the release of Sparkroom Lead IQ 1.0, a lead performance optimization platform customized to the needs of marketers and lead buyers in the mortgage industry. Today, we launched Sparkroom Lead IQ 2.0, a lead optimization platform for the higher education industry. Read the full release here. It has always been part of our vision to extend our platform across multiple lead generation categories and today we make that vision reality.

Schools like University of Phoenix, Capella University and Career Education pioneered online direct response marketing and continue to be among the largest buyers of online media. To market efficiently and effectively, schools need sophisticated software platforms to manage and measure their lead sources. Sparkroom Lead IQ delivers that platform. As we have been out visiting with schools over the past month to share our progress and get feedback on the platform, the feedback has been unanimous the product is “ground-breaking”, “generations ahead of existing solutions”, and my favorite, “thank you.”

We look forward to talking more about our work with schools in the coming months.

ps more blogging is a New Year’s resolution that we plan on keeping!