Watching a brand struggle to impose its "relevance" on a community of social media users is often akin to listening to a comic trying to explain his or her joke to an audience that doesn't (or doesn't want) to get it. Instead of organic connection and rapport, there's only a strange disconnect. Truly leveraging the social and communicational power of social media, Jordan English Gross, COO of Saber Seven and co-founder of Dorthy.com, explains, is less about brands targeting social communities to talk about themselves, and more about learning how consumers pursue their own dreams and aspirations online, and what …

Though we're often creatures of habit, we know human behavior is about a lot more than habit. In its essence, it's about change and finding new ways of expressing needs and intentions. It should follow then that "targeting " behavior should be creative and responsive to change as well. Ironically, however, behavioral targeting has been surprisingly slow to move from a static to more dynamic model, as Rodney Webster, senior product manager of Mediaplex, the technology division of ValueClick, explains.

As times get harder for marketers everywhere, business for predictive analytics company Loyalty Builders is way up, says CEO Mark Klein. His company's Longbow product is a direct marketing system that analyzes transactional data coming from online and offline retailers. The system uses mathematical models based on past buyer behavior to predict what customers are most likely to buy next.

In the user-centric and thus behaviorally driven world of contemporary marketing, the implicit assumption of most marketers is that more is always better, particularly when more means more data points about who's browsing a Web site, what they're doing there, and have done previously online. Sometimes, however, it can be more relevant to focus not on what consumers are doing -- but on where they're doing it from, as Kerry Langstaff, vice president of marketing at Quova, explains.

The launch of the AT&T-backed Future of Privacy Forum last month sparked discussion about how digital media should best address the debate. Matthew Wise, CEO, Q Interactive and former SVP of account services at Draft is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau board who takes issue with some of the early statement by FPF members. Rather than start the debate over whether data is or should be collected, Wise argues that the argument really should surround data's proper use.

During the past several years, as marketers jumped headlong into the online channel, many have embraced behavioral targeting with excitement. That excitement, however, while genuine and mostly warranted, has not always been grounded in an understanding of BT's diversity or complexity. The challenge and opportunity for both marketers and behavioral networks in a recession, Chris Hansen, 360i's vice president of performance marketing, explains, is to learn to move beyond a "one size fits all" approach to leveraging behavioral data.

Profile scraping and usage tracking is one technologically advanced way to leverage online community behaviors, but interactive technology also makes the direct human approach more efficient. Marketing firm Passenger has erected what it calls a "customer collaboration" platform that major clients like Mercedes-Benz, ABC, Adidas and Chrysler have used to watch and listen to their customers in more contained and controlled environments than the typical social network or message base. Co-founder Justin Cooper recounts some of the experience with that model and the willingness of customers to help brands build better products and marketing. It is not good enough just …

Marketers have long understood that part of their job of motivating customers (in a down economy, a very big part) includes the creation of timely and relevant incentives. Yet most gift card and other loyalty club promotions remain unimaginatively generic in execution. Stefan DeCota, senior vice-president of MyPoints, explains why the key to unlocking added value in loyalty programs is deploying behavioral data to personalize and customize incentive offers.