Mindset Media comes at behavioral targeting from a different direction and with a somewhat different aim from typical ad networks. Via intricate personality profiling, it promises to intercept online users whose "mindset" (personality traits) makes them most likely to consider particular brands and products. As co-founders Jim Meyer, CEO, and Sarah Welch, COO, explain, this approach does not require that an ad network know a user is already in-market for a product, just that she is the right type.

The growth of behavioral targeting has decisively shifted the focus of many online marketers from the paradigm of the page to one of consumer-based messaging. What's often been forgotten amid all the behavioral hoopla, Russ Fradin, CEO of Adify, explains, is that for brands the benefits of behavioral require not only targeting the right person -- but the right person in the right placement.

Understanding the psychology of purchase behaviors and segmenting online audiences accordingly is one of the growth areas for behavioral methods. But where is the best place to capture the behaviors that are most relevant to your company's goals? This week we explore yet another approach that tries to apply academic research to consumers. The two-year-old Decision Tactics method actually puts consumers into a product-specific decision matrix to discern the major purchasing segments for an item and each group's key purchase drivers. Co-founder Shlomo Ron explains how it worked recently for Gateway Computers.

For all its growing technical sophistication, behavioral marketing has remained largely fixated and dependent on search and site browsing data, useful but ultimately relatively weak indicators of true purchase intent. The biggest challenge -- and opportunity -- ahead for the industry, is to more deeply understand, organize and leverage post-search behavior within specific verticals, Roy Shkedi, CEO of AlmondNet, explains.

The recently launched 7 Billion People is an intriguing application to e-commerce of the real-world psychology behind buying behaviors. As CEO Mark Nagaitis tells us, his new Web analytics system tries to discern in a site's audience different "buying personalities" that marketers can talk with in very different ways.

Most behaviorally savvy marketers know full well that the "single-click theory" of consumer behavior, which hypothesizes that conversions are best attributed to the last click a consumer makes before purchase, is fundamentally flawed. Alan Osetek, Connexion.a's executive vice president, sales & marketing, discusses how marketers can move beyond the single-click model by mapping and measuring what he calls spheres of influence.

Behavioral targeting has widely succeeded in changing the rhetoric and terminology of marketers. Rare indeed is the self-respecting behavioral advertiser who doesn't speak in terms of having a one-to-one dialogue with customers. Yet, as Ryan Okum, president of StreetWise Concepts and Culture, explains, moving beyond the habits of the older impressions-based marketing paradigm requires more than talk. It demands the cultivation of a new skill set.

Until just last week, Rich Frankel was widely known in the behavioral targeting community as Yahoo's leading expert on the technology and senior director of product marketing. Newly appointed as COO of SocialMedia Networks, Frankel is moving his vast experience and knowledge into the social networking space, and so we asked him to reflect on how BT will work in social media applications the company helps developers build and deploy. Joining the discussion is Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia, who says that social networks are causing a demonstrable shift in online behaviors.