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KDPaine & Partners announces MarketFramer, a new tool to help marketers better frame messages for their markets

BERLIN, N.H. ( August 12, 2008)—New Hampshire-based social media and PR measurement consultancy KDPaine & Partners announced today an advanced social media tool designed to help organizations quickly get a handle on what their marketplace is saying and thinking, enabling them to craft their messages accordingly. Based on KDPaine & Partners’ 22 years of media analysis and research experience, the new tool, MarketFramer, takes fundamental principles of sociology, public relations measurement and survey research and applies them to social media, blogs and other consumer generated media, to order to produce a report that answers questions like:

“Ever since we started measuring consumer generated media in 1995, people have been asking us if there’s a way to get answers to questions like this without doing a large-scale survey research project,” explained Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners. “In part they have budget concerns, and also question the results of phone surveys when many consumers only have mobile phones. But, they’re mostly concerned about the time it takes and the complexity of the programs. People don’t have time to wait for survey results, they need answers right away,” Paine added. “At KDPaine & Partners, we know that conversations are driving choices in the marketplace. Because they’re based on what people have experienced, we believe that those conversations are every bit as accurate a predictor as traditional survey research. We thought why not analyze and aggregate those conversations to answer the questions clients are asking?”

Paine explained that, from start to finish, MarketFramer is a simple 3-step process. “Naturally, it starts with a conversation about which markets are important, which brands are important, and who or what might be influencing the conversation,” Paine explains. “Armed with that information, we use a variety of social media analysis tools to search the on-line environment for conversations that relate to the client’s issues, market or questions. We then gather and analyze that data to determine trends and issues and deliver to the client a simple, clear, easy-to-understand report that answers the specific questions the client is asking. Additionally, our clients can access their data online 365/24/7.”

Pricing for MarketFramer starts at $10,000 per marketplace and typical turnaround time is typically about two weeks.

About KDPaine & Partners
KDPaine & Partners is a New Hampshire-based consultancy that provides plans, products and services that help Public Affairs and Marketing professionals measure their success and make better, more informed decisions for their organizations. For more information about KDPaine & Partners, go to http://www.kdpaine.com.

MarketFramer was created because of two major developments in research.
First of all, one in seven households was cell-phone only in 2007 and the Pew Center for the People and the Press estimates that as many as 37% of people today are now cell-only users.
http://people-press.org/report/391/ What this means is that accurate phone surveying has gotten very expensive – up by a factor of 3X in the last three years. And, if you don’t include cell-only households, you’re getting a biased sample. Additionally the no-call lists have also made it significantly harder to reach people, further adding to the cost.

 Secondly, technology has allowed people, (customers, stakeholders,
employees) to talk to each other as well as to organizations directly, without any filtering or media interference. Technology like Twitter, Facebook, Typepad etc has made it incredibly easy for anyone with a computer to tell the world what he/she thinks. And if they’re particularly passionate they can communicate those feelings via photographs (Flickr) and video (YouTube) As a result, your stakeholders are talking about products, services, technology, issues all the time.
Today’s technology allows us to ability to listen to these conversations and find out what they REALLY think. 

 How does MarketFramer work?

Market Framer uses sophisticated text mining techniques to identify what people are talking about and where those conversations are taking place.
But  technology has its drawbacks. A computer can’t tell the difference between sarcasm and irony. Also, if you rely entirely on computers and you want to know what’s going on in the “virtual storage” marketplace, you’re going to pick up conversations like “ I spent virtually the
entire weekend putting my clothes in storage”   -- so you need humans,
trained to analyze the context as well as the words, to interpret the data correctly so you can make decisions based on it. That’s what makes MarketFramer unique. We combine technology with trained human research analysts to make sure you get the most accurate data that is relevant to what you’re trying to accomplish. So the client gives us a key phrase or market that they want to study. We spend a week or so pulling data about that topic into our analysis system and screening out the irrelevant bits. We.

 Traditionally, the advantage of a phone survey is that you get a more visceral, immediate and authentic response than a mail or email survey, because you can hear the tone of voice. With social media, you’re getting an equally authentic voice because you’re hearing what people are saying to each other, their peers rather than an interviewer. The challenge is that in order to analyze data, you need to be able to group it and categorize it accurately. That’s where our expertise and methodology comes in. You need to either ask closed-ended questions, or at least categorize the open-ended questions, so MarketFramer does  just that, using our 26 types of conversations http://kdpaine.blogs.com/kdpaines_pr_m/2008/05/how-many-differ.html .
And, because we’ve been analyzing conversations and content for 22 years we also know how to define the tone and emotions that are being expressed.

Once we’ve analyzed and categorized all the data, we then do statiscal anlyses on it in order  to draw conclusions and make recommendations

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Copyright 2002-2007 KDPaine & Partners
177 Main Street, 3rd Floor  I  Berlin, NH  03570  I  603.319.1055  I  kdpaine@kdpaine.com