As data miners drill deeper into the social media terrain for meaningful insight, we are starting to see how online conversations are a kind of behavior. The places, ways and times that people interact with one another online are themselves choices that reveal something about their place in a community and perhaps their likely value to marketers. An interesting project from social media platform provider Ripple6 illustrates the ways in which behaviors within social media can both identify key brand advocates and activate them on behalf of a brand.

Most online verticals have evolved from an early emphasis on targeting media to a belated recognition of the importance of optimizing and personalizing on-site and "point of sale" content and experience. Travel marketing online has followed a somewhat different route until now, as Doug Miller, vice-president of global media solutions at Expedia, explains.

Last week I dipped my toe into the emerging world of consumer opt-in/opt-out through BlueKai's very attractive consumer-facing interface. BlueKai's approach was abbreviated and simple. This week we go to the opposite extreme perhaps. Google's approach is verbose and intricate, but the portal is also very, very careful with its words.

Jeff Hirsch's prediction at the recent Omma Behavioral conference that behavioral targeting would overtake search growth over the next decade in advertiser dollar share was no doubt meant to be -- as it was -- provocative, in the classic manner of insouciant underdog challenges of Goliaths by aspiring Davids. Whether Hirsch's prediction will live on to become the online ad world's version of upstart Joe Namath's famous prediction of a NY Jets upset win over the then-"invincible" NFL champion Baltimore Colts (or not), only time will tell. In a more immediate sense, however, Hirsch's keynote can serve as a useful …

Google's announcement this week of a new behaviorally targeted ad program and accompanying privacy policies seemed to follow themes raised at the OMMA Behavioral event in late February. In ads it serves on third-party sites, the company says it will offer consumers links to explanations for why they are seeing these particular ads and how Google is tracking their behavior.

Publishers and advertisers by now have internally devoted enormous investments in money, time and intellectual capital to behavioral targeting platforms. Yet when it comes to consumers themselves, most brands still like to pretend that behavioral targeting doesn't exist, treating it like a secret vice to be locked away, hidden from the public that simply "can't handle the truth." A study issued last week by Trust(e), an independent nonprofit online privacy advocacy organization, documents why that is precisely the wrong message for brands to be communicating.

At last week's well-attended, highly interactive OMMA Behavioral conference, I was struck by the force with which some long-dormant themes in the behavioral targeting field emerged. I can't remember a show in this series where the move forward in general discussions was so apparent.

While e-commerce marketers have access to powerful platforms for personalizing and optimizing the on-site consumer experience the advertising messaging they deliver off-site has remained, by comparison, static and generic. For that reason display advertising, in the minds of many, has become the ugly duckling of direct response advertisers, living deep in the shadow of paid search and its vaunted database of intentions. One personalization optimization firm which has spent much of the past decade helping e-marketers build recommendation engines to enhance the on-site consumer experience, believes the time is right to expand the of personalization process to off-site advertising creative …