The best science has to be read in order to be appreciated. Physicians deserve for the world to know what they do in the course of their training and career. You work hard, so don’t be shy about sharing how that hard work is applied.

You don’t have to become a Dr. Mehmet Oz or Dr. Drew Pinsky type of promoter, but it’s in the interest of every medical student and physician to learn how to do some basic self-promotion.

Over the coming months, Cur&#275us will be delivering a host of reputation management tools for medical students and doctors. Today I want to highlight one designed for our poster competition entrants.

You put a lot of hard work into your poster and now you have either entered it into the Cur&#275us Fall 2012 competition or you’re thinking about doing so. (if you are a med student or resident and have posters sitting on your hard drive, you owe it to yourself to enter them…there is zero downside unless fun and money are not attractive)

To provide a little context to the strategy ahead, I’ll note that Fall 2012 competition is off to a very strong start with hundreds of posters already entered from all over the US and Europe. Over 25 medical schools are represented. So, the question is how do you develop visibility for your work? This is similar to the challenge of differentiation at a conference, or when you eventually begin publishing papers in a journal, but each venue and context has to have a slightly different strategy.

Cur&#275us has just introduced “social voting” tools to help you promote your work. When someone votes for a poster, they can share their vote to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or all of the above. The idea is for your peers, professors and family to help promote your poster by inviting their social networks to vote for you. Remember, the winners of the poster competition are selected from the top 10 vote recipients…so in order to possibly finish in the top 3 you need to be able to promote your poster into the top 10.

The starting point is to take the link to your poster (copy the url from your poster information page) and email it to as many people as you know and ask them to vote for your poster. The link brings them straight to your poster page where they may vote. (they can also see how many votes and views you have received) At present, the top posters have earned just over 50 votes….you can do that in a day if you get to it and encourage your friends to leverage the social voting features.

Promoting your poster is just a microcosm of promotion, but it’s a useful exercise to both drive toward some of our competition prizes and get a little exercise in minor self promotion that benefits all