When social media was introduced to the world, those in the communications business saw an opportunity to connect with customers like never before. Evolution took over and now social media fuels the branding efforts behind every marketing campaign.

On Sept. 11, like every other company’s social media ritual, AT&T posted its tribute to the tragic day: an image of a hand holding a Blackberry Z10 and taking a picture of the 9/11 Memorial “Tribute in Light.”

The picture was intended to pay respect to those affected by 9/11. But when the tribute was tweeted out, it was ambushed by hate tweets accusing AT&T of a “shameless “ marketing ploy. The attack was so severe that AT&T was forced to remove the picture from its Twitter. An hour later, the Facebook post of the photo followed suit.

Without this firm social media response from the public, AT&T’s tribute photo would never have been removed.

However, inadvertently, this response also gained more publicity and social media exposure than any AT&T marketer could have ever intended.

When people started using social media to counter AT&T’s 9/11 photo, it initiated a chain reaction.

Essentially, efforts to remove the 9/11-tribute photo only increased its presence, which was the very practice the public set out to prevent.

This in turn got more people to post and interact on social media regarding the photo. The picture accumulated more than 300 tweets and 400 Facebook shares, according to ABC News.

Throughout the day, the virtual riots that occurred online caught the attention of news reporters. All of a sudden, major media outlets were writing articles about AT&T’s photo, including CNN and Business Insider.

This in turn only increased the strength of AT&T’s search engine optimization.

Many will argue that negative publicity is bad for a brand. However, in the advertising industry, a controversial advertisement that the public abhors always has a purpose and usually completes a client’s objective, at the very least, by attracting attention.

Similarly to AT&T, Rolling Stone was in the hot seat when it published its July edition with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, on the cover. Everyone was in shock and brutally disgusted. Stores like CVS, Walgreens and 7-Eleven refused to sell the magazines. Plenty of people also threatened to drop their subscriptions.

Yet, on this same day, radio stations all directed their conversations at Rolling Stone; people would not stop posting about the cover on social media and it became the subject of many news articles.

Even Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was talking about Rolling Stone. The issue of the magazine ultimately sold 13,232 copies in twelve days, more than double any Rolling Stone edition that came out in 2012.

Intentional or not, the public transformed a magazine cover into a well-integrated advertising campaign for Rolling Stone.

People hated the cover because they believed it glorified a terrorist and his actions.

Ironically, the public touted the cover more than anyone else.

In fact, Rolling Stone might find that controversial magazine covers do more good for its branding than bad for its reputation. After all, just a few months later, Rolling Stone published another controversial cover, featuring former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez. Although this time the cover was exalting a mass murderer.

As educated Americans, we need to think about our role in social media and marketing, and the influence we have. Advertisers use the public to carry out and promote their posts. We are the vehicle that drives the demand for this content.

This being said, the media will continue to glorify terrorists when its readership is doing the same thing.

Bram Berkowitz is a senior advertising and entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected].

Published on September 19, 2013 at 2:40 am