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The iPad is now officially available for pre-order, which means that news is going to be flowing in all day about its various specs and features. We’ll keep you updated on said news with this handy-dandy, ever-changing post. Keep your eyes here for the latest.

If you’re still trying to figure out if you want to pre-order an iPad or not, check out the below to help you decide.

iPad Features

- Screen rotation lock: Apple has added a button to the side of the iPad that locks the screen in either a vertical or horizontal position, no matter which way you turn it. This is sure to make using the iPad in bed or on the couch easier.

- ePub support through iTunes: Apple’s website now has a dedicated i-books page that offers more information about the built-in e-reader and what formats it will support. If you already have DRM-free ePub titles, you can sync those books with the iPad using iTunes.

- VoiceOver Works with i-Books: Apple is integrating its VoiceOver technology into the entire device, including the i-books app. This means that blind or vision-impaired users can have the text read aloud. Sweet!

- Better video support: Apple didn’t highlight this feature, but on the Tech Specs page, we learn that the iPad will support more than just the standard Apple-approved video formats (*.mov, *.mp4, *.m4v) and will also support AVI and Motion JPEG. Apple has never supported AVI on its iPod/iPhone devices, so this is a great step.

- Share YouTube Videos on Facebook: The YouTube page has an interesting note at the bottom — you can easily e-mail a YouTube video to friends or share it on Facebook.

More?

Have you found any new info about the iPad? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: apple, iBooks, ipad, ipad guide, youtube

Chris Allison is a social media strategist at NeboWeb, where he helps clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind @Neboweb.

As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.

Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?

Social Media as a Catalyst

With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to understand that social media is neither the end nor the beginning of any marketing effort. Rather, social media is a catalyst that works most effectively when it is finely woven into the fabric of a brand’s other activity.

When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities. Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.

1. Cause Marketing

The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation – pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation process.

However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter account.

One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional benefits to the cause marketing table:

1. Access to increased publicity
2. The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining conversations
3. The ability to bring customers into the support process

Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where Pepsi will donate their funds as well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog.

By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice). Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).

Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.

Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.

2. The Offline World

Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects, locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.

Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.

Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer support representatives that can help customers on location.

On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.

3. Media Coverage

Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful (Iran’s election crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.

When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.

Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited from traditional coverage:

Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among ‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of old media carry
significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of the credibility their names lend.

I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is often read over days, weeks, or even months.

The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.

4. Technology

Lastly, your social media strategy is inherently paired with technology. Without technology, social media cannot exist. However, technology’s role in creating a social media strategy often goes understated.

At SoCon10, a social media conference in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.

But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus, perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the strategy.

Conclusion

Synergy is the name of the social media game. Whether you’re coming from a small company or a well-known brand, starting as far back as possible, zooming out and staring at the big picture, is crucial to creating a strategy that makes sense.

These are four of the most important pieces to the social media puzzle. If you can think of more or have something to add to these listed, please leave a note in the comments.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

Tags: cause marketing, List, Lists, mainstream media, MARKETING, PUBLIC RELATIONS, social media, technology

Google has just rolled out the first version of the Google Wave extensions gallery, making it easier for users to take advantage of some of the cool add-ons developers are building into the service.

After making a big slash at Google I/O last year, Google Wave (the real-time communication platform that is still in preview) has re-gained some momentum, thanks to an improved API and the addition of e-mail notifications. The addition of an extensions gallery speaks to even more growth on the service’s part.

If you have a Google Wave account, you’ll see an “Extensions” item in your navigation panel. Click on it and you can see what extensions are available to install and then use.

Here’s a rundown of some of the extensions you can install and use now:

Wave Sudoku – Play Sudoku with a friend in real-time using Wave

Developers Extension Installer — Developers can use this to create an embeddable installer for extensions they create

Yellow Highlighter — Adds a yellow highlighter tool to your toolbar

Trippy — Useful for planning trips with friends

Video Chat Experience — Video chat in Wave

Pollo Gadget — Conduct polls and surveys across Wave

AccuWeather — See the weather of people in the Wave or from places you are planning on visiting

Once you install an extension, in most cases it is added to your toolbar and can then be accessed within a wave.

There are more extensions in the gallery and developers can submit their own to be included by going to this submission page for Google to review.

What Google Wave extensions are you using? Let us know!

Disclosure: Mashable has teamed with Google for the Google Wave API Challenge.

Tags: Google Wave, google wave extensions

Twitter announced yesterday that it would finally be adding location support and, while they certainly appear to be doing it right, we have to wonder about the new feature.

Twitter seems like it's a bit late to the game on this one, even though we've all been talking of the "location-based wars" lately. We already have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown, BrightKite and more - do we really need Twitter too?

Sponsor

First, we have to say that we're quite happy with the opt-in, "back out at any moment" method that Twitter is taking on including location into its service. Not only do its users have to opt in, they can even set the function to check every time they tweet as to whether or not they want to include location information. The specificity of the location data can also be chosen, whether you're including exact longitude and latitude coordinates or just letting everyone know you're in the hood.

So, on these points, we say "hurrah!" for doing the location thing right. Now, on to why we really won't be using it much, nonetheless.

When Twitter first came out, it was both a protocol and a place. That is, it was a website, Twitter.com, based on the 140 character message backbone. While the website was our only choice for a while, outside of text messaging, we quickly moved on to third-party clients that did it all much better. And now we have smartphone apps, web apps and desktop apps. Nowadays, Twitter feels much more like a protocol than place.

We've already moved on and separated out our location-based tweeting into a completely separate part of our brains. We have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown and Brightkite. We have our Twitter interaction where we just say something and we have our Twitter interaction where we mean to share our location. It just seems that, for those moments where we want to share our location in a useful manner, we already have a way and, much like the third-party clients out there, these other apps already do it better.

All of this isn't to say that including location data isn't a great idea. It could be followed up with some seriously interesting uses as more and more location data becomes available in the Twitter stream for outside apps to use. Too bad Twitter went the honorable route, however, and gave people a choice. For most of the tech savvy crowd out there, who use Twitter the most, we' re not sure that the Twitter homepage is going to be where we choose to include our GPS data. Most services have already found a way to include that data, by using Twitter in the way its been used best - as a simple messaging protocol that lays at the heart of some very cool interaction. Why would we want to enable the core to track us? That's just throwing our location data out there in the wind, to be gathered and used by whoever wants and that's not really the point. Context is what makes location important.

Where will all this location based tweeting come in handy? Real life situations like Haiti and Iran. And in some cases, maybe for good and maybe for bad. There is surely something to be done with all this data, but we can tell you one thing - in our day to day tweets, we will not be turning the GPS on.

But enough about us - will you be using Twitter's new location feature? Will you say yes when it asks or are you already satisfied with sharing your location with third-party apps?