We are just weeks away from jamming ourselves in line for coffee at the Starbucks, getting lost in conference halls and misplacing our conference bags somewhere in the exhibit hall. And we do this for one very important reason, to share research on the most rigorous stage in the Communication world.

This is, for many, a jumping off point for the next step in the research process. Perhaps the papers are fine-tuned after the conference, or already in the long queue for peer review in a journal. But the main goal is to publish and disseminate your work throughout the academy, and to push the discourse in new and exciting directions.

This work that you do is compulsory in the ever-criticized world of promotion and tenure, and with the glut of journals flooding the marketplace and Internet, it's hard to stand out from the rest when most entry points are initiated from a simple Google search.

Jean Baudrillard wrote in the Murder of the Real that "because of an excess of information, we have lost access to real information," I'll take this as a little less academic (since I'm not working in hyper-reality) and a little more practical (I'm not the scholar here). The information researchers add to the library can get lost with limited capabilities of finding the right piece in an excess of information. Careful curation is still in need, but in this academic world; the curators need to be the authors.

This is where ICA can help. On Saturday May 26 at noon, I’ll be holding a session on how to promote your research, how to make your work more findable, and what you can expect from your publisher.

I'll also share how ICA can help you disseminate your work to the mainstream media. Towards the end of the session I hope to gather new ideas from the attendees as well, we can share what works and what doesn't. What success you’ve had using social media or good old-fashioned email.

See you in a few weeks!