After the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11th Microsoft’s Bing Department sent out a tweet that was very negatively received. It appeared to many Twitter users that this department of Microsoft was using the disaster to promote themselves.
The tweet said:
How you can #SupportJapan - http://binged.it/fEh7iT. For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100K.
What users were angry about was the notion that the money would only be sent to Japan if enough people retweeted this message. Users with large followings soon started making their frustration with this tactic known. One example was Michael Ian Black, who accused them of using a tragedy as a marketing opportunity.
Microsoft eventually donated all $100K, which just shows how bad of an idea this retweet to raise money was. If they were going to donate the money, which they pretty clearly were going to do, they should have done it without these weird strings attached.
I think the biggest thing to take away from this is the difference between a company doing something good because it’s a good thing to do and a company using a disaster to get attention. There is a respect for the people going through the disaster in the former, and it is something that Microsoft neglected.
As PR professionals I think it’s important for us to think about whether what we do is respecting the people we’re interacting with or if we are taking advantage of them.
