Yes, you would wrap your content in a div or section tag that uses the itemscope attribute:
Code:
<div itemscope>CONTENT GOES HERE</div>
Then you can add properties to HTML tags within the div
Code:
<div itemscope>
<p>My name is <span itemprop="name">Neil</span>.</p>
<p>My band is called <span itemprop="band">Four Parts Water</span>.</p>
<p>I am <span itemprop="nationality">British</span>.</p>
</div>
There are lots of examples from
http://www.Schema.org and from W3.org:
http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/. There's a good explanation on these sites of how and why/when to you this markup, but it's fairly new and depends on HTML5... and most browsers are only recently compliant with HTML5. Even now, IE9 scores only 130 out of a possible 400 points for HTML5 compliance. Chrome is the most compliant browser, and Google does recommend the use of microdata, so I am assuming that it might make some difference to the SEO of your site. How much is hard to say. Some people have noticed that their site has actually dropped in ranking after using microdata.
Here's an article that explains it a bit more:
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/html5-microdata/.