At DigiStar Media, her digital marketing and social media consulting business in Harrison, Robin Colner saw a knowledge gap and anxiety among business owners trying to navigate a world of new and fast-changing marketing platforms.
“Social media has transformed the way people buy and how people choose products and services,” she said. “It”™s important” for businesses to adapt.
Confronted with social media, mobile and email marketing practices and terms like search engine optimization, “Business owners are truly confused about how to make sense of all this,” said Colner, a teacher at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business and founding director of a digital and social media professional certificate program at Fordham”™s Westchester campus. “They don”™t know whether to hire one agency or 10 agencies and how to measure and monitor the effectiveness” of new marketing practices and agencies claiming expertise.
- Robin Colner
“Most people in business have gone to school when the Internet wasn”™t invented. There”™s a huge skills gap and confusion,” said Colner, who does not want those businesspeople “to feel marginalized” because they grew up in a pre-digital world.
“That”™s what spurred my interest in having Fordham start a program designed to help educate everyone in this field,” she said. “It was my brainchild.”
Offered by the Fordham School of Professional and Continuing Studies, the digital and social media professional certificate program includes six 12-hour courses in each fall and spring semester. Students pay a $450 fee for each course, all of which are taught by working professionals in the digital marketing and cybersecurity fields. To receive a program certificate, students must complete six courses with passing grades.
“It serves so many different parts of our population” Colner said. The Saturday and weeknight courses have drawn bankers, wealth managers, insurance salespeople, doctors, lawyers and “the 20-year-olds who are not being taught these skills in any undergraduate liberal arts college curriculum,” she said.
“The employers come and hire the 20-somethings en masse thinking they know this” new marketing area. “They come to my class already in the job and they”™re expected to know this” in order to perform their job and to advance in the company. Having taken program courses, “Several are doing their jobs better now.”
“I get a lot of IBMers,” executives laid off as the corporate giant downsized in recent years, Colner added. “We”™re getting digitally savvy people in our program who don”™t have the skills in social media and mobile and email marketing.”
“Fordham has really stepped up in front,” Colner said. The Jesuit university saw the need “to help the business community in this area really stay competitive. ”¦ A lot has changed in the last three or four years and a lot of businesses have been disrupted.” Colner said the Fordham program she directs might add a video marketing course in the fall semester that starts in September.
The professional certificate program “is a new form of education that”™s come up in the last few years,” she noted. It”™s designed for students who don”™t want to enroll in and pay for a full-time master”™s degree program.
Some students in the program travel to Westchester from Queens, Long Island and Fairfield County in Connecticut. “For some reason, they can”™t find this kind of program anywhere,” Colner said.
After two years, the digital and social media program for professionals has tripled in size, drawing 36 students in this spring semester, the director said.
“We”™re keeping our students at the cutting edge, we”™re keeping them competitive and able to be more successful in their business and careers,” Colner said. “We”™re having some success with students getting new and better jobs.”
