• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 19, 2014

They’ve got friends in low places, and now they have a better idea what they’re saying. Universal Music Group Nashville has chosen NetBase Live Pulse to monitor the real-time social performance of dozens of its top country singers, including Luke Bryan, Eric Church, George Strait, and Scott McCreery, as well as a number of rising stars, the music publisher announced this week.

The NetBase Live Pulse dashboards allows UMG to track posts, tweets and shared images of its artists on all the major social channels, breaking down the content by location, including state-by-state, regionally or globally, and surfacing the most engaging current conversations in real time. Among other things the service allows social teams and executives to locate social hotspots and be alerted to any unusual spikes in social activity (which, as we know, can be signs of something very good or something very, very bad).

In addition to getting real-time intelligence about social media engagement, UMG Nashville is putting the NetBase Live Pulse social monitoring front and center with a huge social media screen in the lobby of its Nashville offices.  

Tony Grotticelli, UMG’s manager of digital content and analysis, stated: “Live Pulses give us a ground-breaking tool for actionable social insights and provide striking visualizations of what millions of fans are saying. We can now provide our artists, managers and labels the net-sentiment and passion of fan conversations in real time.”

In recent years a whole niche industry has grown up around cultivating and monitoring celebrity social media activity. Back in April People.com struck a content sharing deal with WhoSay, which promotes social media content from celebrities including Matthew McConaughey, Channing Tatum, Rory McIlroy, Tom Hanks, Sofia Vergara, CeeLo Green, and Steven Tyler. Content from WhoSay members already appears on social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and China’s WeChat and Tencent.