Is it just me that finds this deeply distasteful?

Bing 'supports' Japan quake survivors

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