It's a marketer's dream. Tap into the power of social media and user-generated video clips without taking on the risk of someone saying something negative about your brand. Advertise on a YouTube style video site, but with full editorial control over what videos are posted. Marketers like GM, Royal Caribbean and Esurance think it's a great idea. That's because they just don't get social media.

There's an article over at Advertising Age that first made me roll my eyes, then made me shake my head and finally made me laugh.

Ok, so that sounds like good news to marketers right? All the power of YouTube without that darned inconvenience of having to listen to people that don't drool over your brand or follow you around like lemmings. It's a marketer's dream.

Yep, a dream. You know, those things that only happen at night when you are sound asleep? The things that DON'T actually work out in real life, because hey...it's real life, not a dream.

Let's continue...

Ohhh...so the MARKETERS are happy...well now, that's all we really need for something to be a success right? To make the marketers happy? Because no business could EVER survive without the support of Fortune 100 companies...oh wait...there's that pesky little option called Google AdWords that seemed to thrive so well for years and years before the Fortune 100 companies figured that they needed to hop on board.

Guess what folks? All the signed on marketers in the world mean diddly squat if you don't have the audience for them to show their ads to.

You see, the thing that these businesses fail to realize is that social media is about taking the good with the bad. You can't score a front page listing on Digg without having some folks make negative comments. You can't invite users to submit videos about your product and expect them all to contain raving endorsements. No business is loved universally. While I understand that marketers want to protect their brand, sometimes you can go so far to protect it that you miss out on the potential to promote it.

A new site with corporate control may fly. If they use it to release popular clips from TV shows and movies, if they upload things that people WANT to see, then visitors will show up. But without the freedom that comes with a site like YouTube, the new site will NOT surpass YouTube. (Unless of course YouTube shuts down due to legal issues.)

The companies that succeed in the social networking and social marketing arena are the ones that learn how to work with the system, not the ones that try to control the system.

I guess we'll see how long it takes for the big boys to realize that.