Is it just me that finds this deeply distasteful?
Japan suffers the worst earthquake it’s ever had, and Microsoft’s search engine company, Bing, use it as a marketing opportunity. They’re going to donate just $1 to Japanese quake survivors if you retweet their message to all of your friends.
If they were using a service like Google’s Adwords to pimp their wares, they would probably be looking at a cost per click rate of around 40 to 80 cents per click. The financial value of the brand awareness they’ll get from piggy-backing on a disaster to try and get their Twitter account to as many people as possible is incalculable.
They’ve even capped the value they’ll donate at $100k anyway. Given how like people are to hit retweet, because frankly it’s a pretty easy way to give $1 for doing practically nothing, they’re going to have multiplied their Twitter followers exponentially, and reached god knows how many people, and all they had to do was manipulate a horrific disaster that’s killed 1,000s for their own business purposes.
Looks like Microsoft can still teach city bankers a thing or two about evil and greedy business practices!
Ironically, if you’re looking for good resources to help the survivors of the Japan quake, Google aren’t doing a bad job of collecting a few of the donation pages of the charities active over there at http://goo.gl/ayln5
reminds me of those chain emails which promised £1000s for fowarding on. except microsoft had nothing to do with that and, given its founder’s philanthropic bent, this does smack of oppotunistic rubbish. this technique is fine (well, at least not offensive) on jaffa cakes raising money for comic relief, not for emergency disaster aid.
Good example with the chain emails, totally agree. Also think that jaffa cakes should be brought into any debate that’s worth having 😉