Colleges, universities and most other post-secondary education programs come in two varieties: accredited and unaccredited. Accredited programs are those we're most familiar with and include everything from small liberal arts colleges to major state universities.
A good content strategist brings copywriting, IA, design, and other critical skills to your organization. She will have an encyclopedic knowledge of your website, your marketing/communications in other arenas (print, bulletin boards, social media), your departments, et cetera. She'll keep her eyes and ears open to every bit of information about your school.
A number of years ago, I did a presentation called "Higher Education's Web Offenses" at a HighEdWeb conference. I used one of my favorite Mark Twain pieces, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, as the basis for my presentation. The point I tried to make was that colleges and universities were still (in the mid 2000s) leaving important business decisions to unqualified amateurs. Here we are in 2011 and we're still expecting amateurs to make important business decisions
Another journalist advances the "MySpace is garish; Facebook's minimalism is better" argument. As I pointed out in another post, conscientious restraint (Facebook's minimalism) is a marker of bourgeois fashion. To wit:
"... while Facebook was spare and organized, MySpace pages were given to garish fonts and epilepsy-inducing images."
Kyle James, in his post Social Network Failure: What Happened to MySpace? #fail, speculates on why MySpace "failed" and if Facebook could have a similar future. It's been two years since his post and Facebook has only grown. Based on what I've read, that comes as no surprise.
I'm a big fan of Indi Young's Mental Models. Once you've seen and actually held in your hands one of the diagrams that comes out of her process, you'll realize just how flawed personas are.
