I’m really happy to announce that I will be speaking, at the Blog World & New Media Expo, on a panel called “Avoiding Diaster: How Not to Use Social Media”.

I’ll be joined on the panel by:

Lee LeFever – Principal, Common Craft

Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer, Doe-Anderson and Blogger, SocialMediaExplorer.com

Darren Rowse – Owner, ProBlogger.net; Co-Founder, Sixfigureblogging.com; Co-Founder and VP Training, b5media and Co-Author, “ProBlogger: The Book

(Darren is to be confirmed. He’s hoping to come, but it’s not 100%).

I am delighted and, honestly, quite honored to be on a panel with them. All three are great, brilliant and truly good guys. It should be a total blast.

The panel aims to discuss how not to approach social media for people looking to promote themselves and/or their companies through blogs, forums, social networking sites and other social spaces online. We’ll highlight and discuss strategies and tactics that can damage you and your brand, such as introtisements and adverquestions (veiled advertisements), lying about your affiliations, never giving anything of value, being ignorant of your surroundings and much more.

The takeaway from the panel will be a better understanding of how to utilize the social web to get the word out about yourself and/or your organization. We learn not only from best practices, but from poor practices. Who you want to be, directly relates to who you don’t want to be.

This is definitely a subject that I am passionate about. It was also inspired, in part, by an awesome post by Wendy Piersall called “10 Social Media Blunders that Can Destroy Your Brand”. The points discussed during the panel will be based, to some extent, off of this post, with permission from Wendy, who we wanted to be on the panel – but she’s already rocking the conference pretty hard, from what I gather.

We don’t know what day the panel will be on, yet – either September 20 or 21. The conference is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you are coming out for it, please let me know as I’d be happy to meet you! It’ll be my first time going and it looks like an awesome conference. I am hoping to do more, especially with the book and their bookstore. So, hopefully, I’ll see you there!