Once again this week, the issue of personal privacy and online ad targeting vaulted from the realm of trade chatter into national headlines. A pending bill in the New York State Assembly would put legal restrictions on the collection and use of personal data.

Particular social networks may come and go in popularity. The buzz about social media may ebb and flow as well. But one thing most marketers agree on is that the phenomenon of user-generated media is here to stay. The still unanswered question for marketers, however, is how to adapt meaningfully to it. The first step in answering that question, Adam Shlachter, Mediaedge:cia senior partner, and group director of MEC Interaction, explains, is to lose the (still deeply ingrained) notion that UGM is just traditional media on steroids, calling only for yet more intrusive and intensive applications of media and targeting …

Traditionally, Web analytics of on-site behavior and email metrics have peacefully co-existed in separate silos. Once a message gets its audience to a site, many email marketers believe their work is done. Stefan Pollard, director of email marketing best practices, and Dan Miller, manager of professional services, both of Lyris, Inc. argue for a real marriage of the two disciplines.

For most online marketers the goal of "Web 2.0" has been to create Web sites that attract and immerse visitors, prompting their maximum engagement with a rich variety of interactive content. In their single-minded pursuit of driving traffic, however, many marketers have failed to address a more fundamental goal: customizing and adapting their content to the personal needs of consumers, as Olivier Chaine, CEO of Magnify 360, explains.

Not surprisingly, NASA.gov has a staggering amount of information for students, space enthusiasts and plain old Capt. Kirk wannabes like us. With 25 million unique visitors last year across 600 million page views, the site's relaunch in December was a major undertaking. Brian Dunbar, Internet Services Manager, NASA, worked with eTouch system and its managing principal, public services sector, Eashwer Srinivason. In order to build tag clouds and more audience-driven search results, they relied on the Baynote system of using crowd behavior to improve relevance. Here, Dunbar and Srinivason discuss how a site as vast as the cosmos itself is …

All leads, as any good marketer knows, are not alike. The challenge of lead generation online is not just leads but quality leads, leads that have a high likelihood of translating not only into single conversions but into regular customers. Targeting for quality leads entails moving beyond generic product category targeting and adapting behavioral methodology to lead generation, Brad Powers, CEO of Active Response, explains.

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.