The Tsunami's of Japan

This past week, the seventh largest earthquake ever recorded rocked the pacific ocean.  Being closest to Japan, the Tsunami's from the quake wreaked havoc across the entire country.  I found out from a forum that I post on.  From there I watched a live CNN stream online about the situation that was posted.  I started live-tweeting the updates and the general information of the situation.  #Prayforjapan and #Tsunami became trending tweets within an hour or so.  Bing's twitter, the search engine created by Microsoft, posted this tweet:

This didn't go over well with the twitter community.

Some people saw it as Microsoft using the tsunami for Bing's publicity.  One person tagged the tweet as #brandfail.

Bing followed up with this statement above 5 hours later.  They didn't delete the original tweet and donated $100k to the Tsunami relief.  Microsoft posted something controversial, listened to the reaction of their audience, and acted on it.  It was a great public relations move that could have ended very badly. It did seem a little suspicious at first, but they followed through and donated 100k to the Tsunami efforts.