Reaching physicians: be SMART about it, but don’t TWEET around

When I was a kid, I remember seeing schoolteachers out and about (i.e., store, restaurant) and just couldn’t believe it.  What?  They let them out of the school?  Shouldn’t they be in the classroom – clapping erasers, reading the dictionary or putting the border on the bulletin board?  It was hard to imagine them as everyday folks doing everyday things.  I find I do that with physicians.  Shouldn’t mine be at the office – reading scans, looking through a microscope or discovering cures?  Nope.  Turns out they get to lead normal lives too.  And boy do they.  A study from Manhattan Research found 64% of physicians own smartphones and that this number is expected to rise to 81% by 2012.  And can you find them updating their status on Facebook?  Yes, 88% of them have visited the site.  But, odds are you won’t find them tweeting – with about 16% of them using Twitter, which is a bit less likely than the U.S. adult population at large.