Microsoft has found itself in the middle of a Twitter furore today as it was forced to backpedal following a tweet sent out from its @Tweetbox360 account. The company tweeted: “Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking ‘Back to Black’ over at Zune”. The Microsoft PR team behind the Twitter account has sent out an apology claiming that this wasn’t commercially motivated after it received a barrage of complaints.

How can they possibly say that it wasn’t commercially motivated? It’s no different to standing outside a shop, wearing a huge sandwich board marked up with arrows, while shouting “this way to spend your money with us”! It’s difficult to see how communications professionals could have misjudged the mood of their audience so very badly.

Don’t get me wrong, one aspect of our job as PR consultants is to piggyback on the news to the advantage of our clients. The key is that this shouldn’t be at any cost.

Twitter should be used as a tool to communicate a brand’s personality, its values and to build up rapport with stakeholders. Album sales will inevitably go up anyway and people love Twitter because you can avoid being subject to overt and crude marketing. Given the tragic events over the past few days, this showed an absolute lack of sensitivity about what’s going on in the world.

Yesterday, Bing was the third most popular search term on Twitter.  If you don’t know what Bing is by now, then you must be either living on another planet or have absolutely no interest at all in all things web-related.

Bing is Microsoft’s latest attempt to break into Google’s monopoly of internet search.  Already dismissed by  Microsoft haters, the service has been in development for several years and promises much in terms of functionality.

One of the key innovations being pushed by the IT giant is ‘guided search’.  This feature promises to quickly categorise results that don’t require the user to sift through pages of content.  I think that many users pick the first link presented to them in Google anyway so why not take on-board the recommendation of a site immediately if the results are exactly what you require?  If Microsoft are confident that they can deliver this then that’s fine with me.

The cashback scheme which is apparently intended to rival with Google Adwords, also sounds interesting.  Users will receive a small dividend each time they purchase an item through the website.  If a site rewards me for using it then this can only be a bonus!

As soon as I heard the news on Twitter, (thanks to eConsultancy!)  I raced over to the site to test out the service to find that it wasn’t actually live.  Instead I had to sit through a glossy corporate video explaining the features to me.  Surely this is a major PR gaffe by Microsoft to announce the service before it’s actually ready for people to use.

With me – and I suspect many other internet users – you only get one chance to impress before I move on to the next site waiting in the wings.  I’m unsure if I’ll have the time, or inclination, to check back with Bing once it’s actually up and running.  I’ll have to wait and see if Microsoft’s $100 million advertising campaign has the desired effect!

Have you heard about Bing and what do you think of its prospects?  Surely any realistic competition for Google is a good thing?

As the legal battle between Google and Louis Vuitton rumbles on, I started to think about how the online giant is becoming more like Microsoft every day.

Previously, Microsoft has always been the target of consumer criticism for its unwieldy operating systems and buggy updates. Over recent years however, as Google has grown and moved into new markets, it too has started to receive increasing levels of criticism.

I’ve never felt comfortable with the amount of my personal data that’s stored online. I wasn’t too happy to hear when Google planned to introduce ‘behavioural advertising’ to its mail service. You may think that viewing these ads in your inbox is harmless but it concerns me that Google stores personal data, including the videos you have watched on YouTube and every search query you have Googled.

News this month that the search engine giant can now track your visits to the thousands of sites that show its ads and then assign you to a category is even more alarming. Where is all this data kept and what else is Google planning to do with it? It claims that seeing adverts based on a person’s browsing history will improve their browsing experience – I’m not so sure.

By 2012, Google aims to create the ‘perfect search engine’. Google co-founder Eric Schmidt has stated that the real issue with achieving this goal is that they ‘don’t know enough about you’. I’m just not sure that I’m ready to tell them everything about myself.

Surely I’m not the only one who is concerned about this invasion of privacy? A quick search round the blogosphere has uncovered many comments from like-minded individuals who think that Google should drop its ‘do no evil’ philosophy. The question is, will it listen to these comments and curb its increasing big brother mentality?