The more content people publish on social media sites and blogs, the more important it is for companies, brands and organisations to monitor what’s being said about them on the web. There is a huge number of Social Media Monitoring services to choose from. Many are using Twingly data about the blogosphere, such as Sweden-based Lissly. We had a chat with Simon Sundén, one of Lissly’s co-founders, about what’s happening at Lissly, what’s to expect in the upcoming month and where he thinks social media is heading.

Please give us a quick introduction of Lissly. What’s the company background and what kind of services are you offering?
Lissly is a social media monitoring tool which you can use to monitor what’s being said on social media any keyword or phrase. We launched our tool in October 2010 and are based in Sweden. Lissly focuses on providing the best monitoring for local markets and languages, which often isn’t that easy with other tools and services. We worked hard to have the best data for Sweden and now we are expanding to other countries & languages in Northern Europe.

What are the main differentiation points of Lissly compared to other Social Media monitoring solutions?
We know the local market and offer monitoring for local languages, especially in Northern Europe. Lissly is also a very easy to use, we like to call it “Social Media Analytics for the People”. But of course you can always go in-depth and get detailed data.

Is there any feature that in your eyes is especially good or useful, that you want to highlight?
Of course everything in Lissly is awesome, but our Forum Monitoring as well as Related Words are some key features I personally like a lot! Currently we monitor a majority of all forum activity in Sweden, including the largest forums in Sweden as a total as well as within each niche. Related Words is a feature where you directly can see what related words & topics are connected to your keyword or project.

What is on the roadmap for the upcoming 12 month? Where is Lissly heading?
We strive to have the best quality on every single language in the Nordic region (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish) and plan to expand to other markets & languages. That also means that we will add a lot of new sources. Every language and country has its own important blogs, forums, social networks – we will allow monitoring of all of them. Other upcoming improvements include an iPhone app that we plan to release in autumn, enhancements to our API, features to show more information regarding each mention (retweets, shares, likes, views, ratings etc.) to better understand the social impact and better functions for bookmarks, notifications and mail reports.

You are using Twingly’s API to collect data from the blogosphere, so you have a rather good insight into the world of blogs ; ) What are your thoughts on evolution and future of blogs?
Yes, Twingly’s API is one of the sources we use to gather blogosphere data and we really like it. Concerning blogs: They have “survived” many years and I’m absolutely positive that they will continue to be an important part of the social web in the future. What will evolve is the way we share and what kind of information we share – with better mobile connectivity and easier services like Tumblr we will see a lot more of picture, video and other media type sharing than plain text. Much of the blogging today doesn’t happen on what we typically call a “blog platform” like WordPress, Typepad or Blogger but rather on video sites, sharing sites etc. We see a lot of video blogs on YouTube, picture blogging, sharing on Tumblr and so on – this is also blogging and I think that this will increase in the future.

Where do you see social media in 2-3 years?
In 2-3 years we will not talk about social media anymore but rather the social web. It’s already becoming harder and harder to find sites on the web that aren’t social. I have a feeling that we are moving towards a web where we increasingly will be dependent on our social identity. This will be the basic platform where all our social activities are tied together – you will use it to comment on sites, register for forums, play games and so on. We already see this today with services like Facebook and Google, but as more sites implement social functionality the amount of information connected to our social identity will grow.