The Johari Model of self-awareness | Holistic Marketing

SELF AWARENESS means knowing about one’s idealized self in terms of aspirations as well as a sense of your presence at present. A component of self-awareness is knowing how one is perceived by others. The Johari Model is a graphic model developed in the 1950’s which aids in the interpretation of self-awareness. This exercises involves psychological communication and the diagram is fairly self-explanatory.

What’s involved:

• Apply a list of words to yourself.
• Have others apply the same list to you.
• Note the similarities
• Note the differences.
• Act on the insights

Do I have the courage to take a test in my blog? My personality is warm, upbeat, artistic, curious and engaging. I am interested in the arts particularly photography and design. I also like the politics of the Civil Rights Movement. I prefer to be generous but have tamed down that impulse over the years. I am happily married to a smart, kind, successful gentleman. We have two dogs and no children. I know “team dynamics” are a crucial business  skill to develop.  I am interested in marketing and working with small entrepreneurial businesses permits me the latitude to leverage my core communication skills.

I am also obsessed with learning new skills and improving existing ones. Right now I am reading four books:

1. Web Analytics 2.o new by Avinash Kaushik [he was an author@Google – and donates the proceedes from his two book to charity]
2. The Art of SEO by Enge Spencer, Fishkin and Stricchiola [fuzzy logic and semantic intent]
3. Eyetracking Web Usability by Nielsen & Pernice [heat maps & gaze plots]
4. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Clay & Esparza [anyone can do a redirect]

and have at least eight more piled on my night table.

The need to learn  traces back to my childhood because my parents rewarded me for being a good student. Their praise and approval motivated me to constantly strive for “very good grades.” Now I learn for the pure sake of love of learning. Coworkers think that I have a high energy level and am focused and determined. Sometimes I am a tad impatient but always find time to help others.  The good news is that it is never too late to improve and learn new things. My husband thinks that I am focused, motivated and smart but he also thinks that I sometimes allow myself to get a bit sidetracked by unimportant details and people with difficult personalities. He is 100% correct. I consider myself extremely responsive.

Shifting gears and seeing connections: Carl Jung identified four psychological archetypes: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition. Understanding how other people relate has always helped me to create compelling visual communication. SWOT analysis, a classical marketing exercise involves determining an organizations internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. Holisitic Marketing also has four components: Relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, & performance marketing. A Product Positioning Map also has four quadrants:At this point I am wondering why the above tests, models, models and maps all have four components and if there is something about the underlying structure of four components that becomes visually and literally compelling?

Site Maps | xml site maps – what’s the difference?

Site maps are used for more than planning and efficient repurposing/redesigning. I recently received my monthly newsletter from internet marketing guru, Bruce Clay. I already knew that when the Google bot first comes to your server, it eagerly searches for the site map and uses the file as a guide to spider all the pages in your site. Bruce uses Google’s site map as a good usability example. Google is perfection in my book. Bruce provides a link to Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Putting information architecture & usability issues aside for the moment, the site map serves as a list of everything the spider needs to digest and index. Appropriate naming conventions are critical for this reason. Then, if your page titles, meta keywords, headers, and content support and inform the page naming, you are on your way to achieving a page one organic position and this is crucial for the internet marketer.

Bruce’s article gets a bit tricky and granular at this point. He competently draws the distinction between site maps and xml sitemaps. Bruce explains that Sitemaps are lists of links in XML, files read by Spiders and traditional html Site Maps could easily be used by humans to navigate a site.

I have found that many people are a bit confused about the difference between site maps and xml sitemaps. Recently, an internet marketing sales manager asked me to discuss/present the differences to his team who probably thought that anyone who found all this interesting and exciting was a bit __________. (fill in the blank)

The really cool/interesting thing is that the site maps and sitemaps (below)  are literally opposite sides of the same valuable coin.

XML sitemap code snippet

Bottom line: make life easy for the Google Bot and also make life easy for your web development team/