Forging a truly interactive dialog between marketers and consumers has been the central premise and promise of online media. Yet, as Blake Cahill, vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies, explains, faced with a new reality in which thousands, even millions of consumers are engaged in active, often passionate conversations and communities about products, most brands remain tone deaf and tongue-tied in their response.

Nielsen's many panels, research and measurement products now span almost all consumer touch points, so increasingly the company is exploring ways of integrating and overlaying the data to generate new insights. A series of "fusion" studies recently from Nielsen Connections, for instance, tries to map actual product buying patterns against TV and Internet usage. As Howard Shimmel, senior vice president, client insights, explains, this is the kind of data that gives media planners much more precise methods of targeting their TV buys.

Internet marketers like to pride themselves on working on "Internet time," where the gap (often traditionally a chasm) between idea and execution is radically closed. Though that pride is well earned in many areas, one realm of Internet marketing which has lagged behind Internet time is multivariate testing, as Eric Hansen, president of SiteSpect, notes below.

Cross-platform media planning has been a hot topic at recent advertising and research conferences. As the ad spend moves online, buyers are more concerned that they are following their offline targets accurately. This week and next we engage two of the major players in digital metrics, comScore and Nielesen, about some recent product announcements and how emerging tools can track consumers better across media. This week, comScore's vice president of product management, Steve Dennen, discusses the company's Segment Metrix offerings.

In the digital media economy data is rightly viewed as a form -- perhaps the most critical form -- of wealth. There's a fundamental difference, however, between data-mining mountainous terabytes of amassed customer information and truly targeting relevant offers based on the correct behavioral triggers, as B.J. Morgan, Director of Segment Management of Unica, explains.

A day after testifying at the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, NebuAd CEO Bob Dykes reflects on his day in Washington -- and the hill his ISP-based behavioral tracking solution now has to climb in the U.S. market. In the last month Charter Communications dropped its deal with NebuAd, and a report from the Free Press and Public Knowledge accused the company's technology of adware-like bad practices. And so Dykes went to Washington as a big target for legislators and privacy advocates.

Lead generation and email marketing are often cursorily dismissed as "old school" by aficionados of the ever-new. Yet when it comes to the new next and best in behavioral platforms, so called "predictive modeling," Matt Wise, CEO of Q Interactive explains, lead generation has actually blazed trails well ahead of the pack.

Most ad networks and behavioral tracking technologies actively reject the notion that they collect personally identifiable information. But when it comes to phone directories, PII is the point. So a person search site like WhitePages.com not only publishes where I live but also my job title, the company I own and a phone number. What is the proper use of such data? That is the sort of question that prompted the company to hold its own privacy panel last month in Seattle. Director of Advertising Strategy Ingrid Michelsen tells us how the company is sorting through the privacy debate and …

One frontier of cutting-edge behavioral targeting is the push toward analyzing anonymous cookie data to predict probable consumer responses with ever greater control for the marketer. Ariel McNichol and Julia Johnston, co-founders of mEgo, outline a radically different approach, allowing consumers to choose the kinds of messaging and targeting behaviors that fit their own needs and interests.