• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 23, 2014

While experts continue to debate the merits of real-time marketing, brands increasingly obsess over the smallest shifts in consumer perfection.

Aiding their obsession, social-media monitoring firms are developing tools to help brands track every potentially-relevant tweet, like, pin, post, and comment across the social spectrum.          

NetBase, for one, just developed a dashboard for following brand activity across social channels and sharing relevant findings within organizations. 

At any given moment, NetBase’s new Brand Live Pulse service shows clients who is talking about their brands, what they are saying, and the intensity with which they are saying it.

NetBase, which was founded in 2004 as a semantic search specialist, now boasts a client list that includes Coca-Cola, Yum! Brands, Sony, Johnson & Johnson and IPG.

For brands, managing their presence across social media platforms has never been more challenging.  On average, the 20 most social-savvy brands had about 14.5 million Facebook fans -- along with 1.9 million Twitter followers -- in March, according to recent findings from social analytics firm Socialbakers.

This year, advertisers are expected to pump nearly $12 billion into social networks around the world, according to eMarketer. That’s 25% more than marketers spent on social last year.