I find your implication that this was a marketing stunt much more insensitive than the original controversial tweet. First off, this is a tweet, so presumably only people who follow Bing would originally see it, and it would be up to them to retweet it.

Is any public corporate humanitarian donation a marketing stunt by your definition? Should corporations keep these things secret? That seems like nonsense to me.

No, because they ask people to retweet it. Hence, they (probably?) want to achieve that people that do not follow @bing will see it in their timeline.

Not every public corporate humanitarian donation is a marketing stunt. I guess it would have been perceived very different, had they just announced that they donated a $100k instead of making the amount that they are going to donate a function of retweets. Just imagine them tweeting "Bing just donated $100k to help the people in Japan. Join us at http://blabla to find out what else we can do."?

Do you really think the people offended by this tweet would have been less offended if Bing had originally tweeted that the donation was already made? I doubt it, especially considering that their follow-up tweet which did just that has only further offended those who have chosen to be offended.

I think the idea was for the $1 donation to be an incentive for people to retweet, which would spread the link to the Microsoft Disaster Response page.

> would have been less offended if Bing had originally tweeted that the donation was already made?

I would find it more acceptable, yes. Not asking people to retweet in order for them to donate UP TO $100K would be more honorable.

There are noble ways to get 100K retweets. This is not one of them.