A report out this week from the Society for New Communications Research trupeted the headline “Blogging Declines as Newer Tools Rule“. As a social media blogger, it attracted my attention.

It turns out though, what’s in decline is the number of Inc. 500 companies maintaining a “corporate blog”, not businesses blogging in general. I’m not at all surprised that some large corporations are stopping using a medium that is, primarily, about building up personal relationships with regular readers through a familiar writing style, interesting topics, wit and discussion. Many corporate blogs are doomed to fail simply because of the tight constraints their authors have to work with.

What’s more interesting is that social media monitoring has not increased over the past year among Inc. 500 companies. In an area of such innovation and growth (I’ll be writing about a company that uses psychometric monitoring to identify brand affinities in the coming weeks) – it’s astonishing to think that major brands are switching off. Perhaps they’ve done what most companies seem to do and monitor before they know why or what they plan to do about it. For more thoughts on that, see my recent post on social media ROI.