At a recent gathering of law firm marketers, a panelist asked how many of the marketers knew what a klout rating is, and, if so, if they knew their own klout ratings.  At most 10% of the audience members raised their hands.

I was reminded of the January posting by Kia Motors’s Corporate Counsel D. Casey Flaherty  about his testing of outside counsel associates’ adeptness on four functions embedded within standard software products such as Word, Excel and Adobe; many of these associates failed the test.

Sadly, law firm marketers are more or less in the same pickle in their area of operations.  For instance, based on the reaction to the klout question, legal marketers (even millennials) still have quite a ways to go in mastering social media in business.  Of course we – like associates – need to be competent at basic functions within standard software, but because we are responsible to help our firms stay on the leading edge, we also quickly need to get up to speed on technologies that are exotic to law firms, but not so exotic these days in the “real” world of marketing technology.  Below is a list of some of the products that I like and which I think merit immediate consideration by law firm marketers.  I have listed each product or company along with the category it represents.  The list is excerpted in part from a long (and growing longer every day) list of marketing technologies with which we in law firm marketing all should be at least passingly familiar.  How many of these do YOU know?  What are YOUR favorites?

Apogee – web analytics

Bitzio – gamification for customer engagement

Manzama – listening platforms

PechaKucha – presentations

Prezi – presentations

SAS – predictive analytics

Vimeo – video platforms

Yammer – enterprise social networks