Redmond, Washington — Software monopolist Microsoft’s Bing team sparked an online outrage when its Twitter donation drive for last week’s catastrophic earthquake / tsunami / nuclear meltdown that devastated large parts of north-eastern Japan, which was perceived to be a tasteless ploy to promote its Bing search engine from a tragedy. Tweet tying company contributions to number of retweets causes uproar.
Early Saturday, the company tweeted: Here is the offensive tweet: It originally tweeted that for every re-tweet it received, Microsoft will donate US$1 up to US$100,000 to aid the victims of the earthquake and tsunami.
Unfortunately, while superficially no more self-promoting than the campaign by AViiQ, Bing’s tweet was plucked up on by comedian Michael Ian Black, who began throwing expletives Bing’s way, saying “Hey @bing, stop using a tragedy as a fucking marketing opportunity.”
From there the negative sentiments boiled up, with Black’s message being repeated with increasing regularity. Eventually, around six hours after their original offer Microsoft capitulated and stopped the campaign, donating $100,000 dollars to the Japan relief effort as penance.
In fact, dealing with fairness to Microsoft, the URL does point to the company’s “Corporate Citizenship” page that describes numerous ways people can help the victims in Japan. However, whether it was a deliberate marketing ploy or merely the result of a marketer’s natural thought process, the tying of the $1 company contributions to the number of retweets smacked of a cereal box-top drive. It also suggested that if there were only a few hundred retweets, Microsoft would contribute only a few hundred dollars.
The reaction was predictable, or at least it should have been: Hundreds of people were killed and thousands are missing following Friday’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Social-media networks, including Twitter, have extended their resource for people looking to make private donations to aid agencies and find contact information for charities.
The backlash was swift.
“Why does not Bing just give $100K to #supportjapan? Why turn a tragedy into a promotional opportunity? That is not even a large sum for relief,” tweeted Kiel T F Schmidt as kieltfs.
If companies wanna help Japan victims, then just give money. Telling people to retweet is using a tragedy for marketing. @bing
Oh yes, of course. @Bing turn the largest earthquake on record to hit #Japan into a marketing opportunity. Nice work, Microsoft.
A day after, on 13 March, Bing repealed its Twitter campaign. It said in a Twitter post it will be donating the full US$100,000 after all, and apologized for the tweet’s negative reception.
“Intent was to provide an easy way for people to help Japan,” Bing tweeted.
So was Microsoft wrong to attempt to cash in on people’s good will for a bit of promotion? Of course not, such campaigns are adopted every day, and to good effect. Regrettably for the software giant, their message may have fallen just slightly over the line that separates marketing and genuine do-goodery, and in a world where the general public are more and more conscious of being marketed to, it did not fly.
The gaffe is suggestive of fashion designer Kenneth Cole’s tweet in response to the Egyptian revolutions. He had tweeted at the time: “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online.”