Social Media Clubhouse Newsletter (1/19/12)

SOCIALMEDIACLUB.ORG GOES ‘DARK’ TO PROTEST SOPA & PIPA BILLS

On Wednesday, January 18th, Socialmediaclub.org along

with dozens of other sites including Reddit, Wikipedia and Craigslist, ‘went dark’ in protest of some legislation that seeks to strangle our beloved Internet. 

These bills known as Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) were created with the intent to stop copyright infringement and protect intellectual property belonging to media makers.  While we do not condone using copyrighted material, the legislation seeks to destroy the Internet by censoring sites and content distributed through channels like YouTube, Google, Craigslist and basically any search engine or web publishing tool.

We are proud to stand next to organizations like Google, Facebook, Mozilla and hundreds more to protest this legislation and encourage you to contact your local Congressional representative to voice your opinion as well. You can do this the old fashioned way by looking up their phone number and calling them – or you can jump over to Public Knowledge website, fill out their short form and let them do it for you. 

As of 3pm EST on January 18th, the AP reported several SOPA and PIPA proponents like Marco Rubio (FL), Representative Lee Terry (NE) and Senator John Cornyn (TX) were withdrawing support of the bill.  

“Earlier this year, this ball passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy. Since then, we’ve heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet. Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences.”  via Senator Marco Rubio

SOPA and PIPA are hardly over though, we still encourage you to contact your local Congressional leaders to tell them to vote AGAINST PIPA on January 24th! 

 

MEMBER RESOURCES

In an effort to introduce you to some of our many member resources available on the Social Media Club website, we want to share with your our Tagged Content feature. 

Tagged Content gives members a view into the trending topics on SocialMediaClub.org by discovering new conversations happening within the industry and even topics being presented at local chapter events across the globe.

We’ve made this video showing you our Tagged Content feature, check it out! 

JOIN SMC ON GOOGLE+

While we were one of the first businesses on Google+ back on June 30th (page was since removed by Google as they weren’t ready for us), we have been a bit slow(er) to jump on it once it opened up again. But we finally did it. We launched a new Google+ page! 

Join our SMC Google+ page for the latest SMC news, original content and great resources from across the web.  

EDITORIAL TEAM HIGHLIGHTS

Have you seen Social Media and After the Wave? Or Pinterest: Pin It While It’s Hot?

Our editorial team publishes original content daily on Social Media Clubhouse blog and you can subscribe here to stay up on all their awesome posts.  

The Editorial Team reflects Social Media Club’s global community with bloggers from Mexico, Sweden, France, The Netherlands, India and the United States.

Meet the team and follow them on Twitter.