According to a new AdWeek article, Twitter has grown over 1,400% in the last year. That’s an amazing statistic.

Twitter is now a necessary part of social media strategy, but you shouldn’t forget about other channels – especially the power of blogs.

We’re running research for a case study on the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre launches. Aside from the semantic analysis videos we’ve already posted, there is another emerging trend: Blogs are the most influential web pages in both ecosystems.

What does “influential” mean in this context? It means these are the web pages that grab users’ attention. It’s a list of key influencers – the places and people you should go to and engage with if you want to spread your message.

Here are the top three most influential pages for both products:

Instead of looking for information on manufacturer or carrier websites, users are going to these respected tech blogs for (what they feel is) accurate information about function, price, and availability.

This isn’t exclusive to these two products, either. In a previous research done on the Blackberry Storm, Engadget also beat the Blackberry corporate website when it came to influence. When AMC opened their new Fork & Screen theater, Kansas City-based movie blog Scene-Stealers.com held more influence over users than the AMC website.

When it comes to experience-based reviews (products, events, places) evidence shows blogs tend to overtake social networks as the place to share thoughts, and Twitter functions as the vehicle that draws users to posts (via shortened URLs).

It’s easy to forget about them, because Twitter is so easy to use and track. But conversations are happening everywhere, and in more than 140 characters.

For more proof, look at the Site Type Breakdown chart for each product (Palm Pre on left, iPhone 3GS on right).

In each case, blogs and videos contribute a large portion of the overall conversation (click the images for a larger view). Knowing where your audience is getting information is a major value to monitoring a product launch.

Tagged as: amc, blogs, iphone, palm pre, scene stealers, twitter