12th January 2016,
We have to be honest and say that it came as a great big surprise to us that the boss of one of Ireland’s pillar banks has the time to read your tweets. Richie Boucher, a nice man himself, who heads up the Bank of Ireland, one of the banks that pretend that they lend to SMEs, actually reads a selection of 2,000 tweets sent to him in a folder every month.
Now we can’t say how much time he spends going through them (his ‘team’ prepares the selection), we don’t know if said same team does a little bit of judicious editing or censoring (moderation is the mot du jour in this area) nor do we know if he pays a blind bit of notice to them. But Richie Boucher does read tweets.
We have a rapidly growing number of younger businesses joining ISME, these are businesses run by the next generation of up and coming entrepreneurs in Ireland. As we blogged previously, it’s a generational thing, not an educational thing, that our younger members rarely spend time reading newspapers. They get their news, views and entertainment online and that’s just the way it is. Similarly their preferred way of communicating is via email, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Again, we’re on the case there and that’s why we blog to engage with our younger members.
So that said we’d like to see if we can get our message about the abject failure of Bank of Ireland (along with the other major banks) to lend to SMEs to Richie in a different way, a way he might finally listen to. Richie doesn’t have a personal Twitter account that we can find but we do know that the ladies and gentlemen at @BOIbusiness are quick to get the message and will pass on tweets that mention Richie Boucher to the great man himself.
So how about it ISME members on Twitter? Start by following @Isme_ie and then send some questions to @BOIbusiness for the attention of Richie Boucher about when their bank is going to get serious about lending to smaller businesses. Our case is rock solid. Survey after survey of ISME members show that the banks have invented a complete Newspeak language to say they’d lend if they could but they can’t because businesses aren’t applying properly and they’re not saying no but that if they were us that they’d wait awhile and apply a little later down the road when lending would be easier but not to take that as a no as they’re the bank that’s backing business and that’s obvious because don’t they run the small business awards and they wouldn’t do that unless they were serious about backing business but no, you can’t have money to keep your small business going just at the moment, but that’s not a firm no though, look on it as a longer term kind of yes.
Tweet your feelings, your frustrations and your experiences to @BOIbusiness and we’ll see if Richie is reading you loud and clear.
