Hey Mike, thanks for the interest.

I'm going to be keeping my two sessions highly practical with a focus on "how to use this stuff in your business."

In "Twitter? I Don’t Even Know ‘Er" I'll be survey social media I consider most important--including blogs--and talking about how to use them for your business and how to get started.

In "Social Media Fundamentals Q&A", I'll be opening it up to the floor for all questions. Hopefully it will turn into a show-and-tell, and, again, I'm going to try to keep it in a "how to" vein.

I think Byron assumes that most of us have encountered personalities on the social media scene who specialize in being self-serving boors. I certainly made that assumption and congratulate anyone who has only encountered helpful, astute digerati. But I've met plenty of toads--haters, critics, pundits, and know-it-alls striving desperately never to be told anything they didn't already know.

Some of them garner large audiences and impressive metrics--someday I'd like to do a study on what qualities enable them to achieve popularity.

The thing is, we've noticed that sometimes when businesses start making forays into social media, they end up behaving boorishly, which probably stems from learned marketing behavior. What we try to tell our clients is: be real; forget the rules and formulae and talk in a way that suits you; be a guest before you try to be a host; make mistakes.

We talk to a lot of people who wonder why no one comments on their blogs, or follows them on Twitter, etc., and Byron's theme is one of the chief problems we find. So while the advice isn't revelatory, it bears repeating, and part of our job is also making it practical.

(Disclosure: I'm Byron's business partner, if you hadn't guessed)