From the desk (and BlackBerry) of Keith Parnell

Nicole and I cannot begin to express the sincere thanks for the thoughts, sentiments and prayers we have received from our social media family over the past week. Your thoughts and comments have been almost overwhelming during this tough time of loss for our family.

To our blog, JASEzone, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook families: We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your friendship and prayers.

May God bless you all for your dear friendship.

Do people know what you do everyday and what your passions are? I meet a lot of people while tooling around the Hampton Roads metro area. I also have an extensive network of friends and colleagues on the Internet. And quite a bit I get the question, “what do you do?” or “what is JASE?” 

Have an Answer Ready

Normally I gauge the situation by reading the body language of the person I’m talking to or take into account our environment on how I answer that question. I like to have the first words that come out of my mouth (or type in my BlackBerry) put exactly into context because those are what people are going to remember.

I had just that situation happen this week from a member of our neighborhood’s civic association. This was my layman’s response to his question, “can you elaborate on JASE being an internet marketing and electronic solutions firm?”

We have several service lines that we provide for our clients. Of those service lines and within the marketing area is building websites for companies, non-profits, individuals, etc. Not only do we design and create websites, we help our clients build their “brand” online. See this post on my blog that will explain a little of what I mean. Keep Norfolk Beautiful at the Ernie Morgan Center at Lafayette Park is one of our clients we do this for. We designed their website, host the website and host their email for them.

Also as part of the marketing package, we help our clients with social community exposure. See our social media website here and blog here that can explain a little more about our services in that area. Social media exposure, handled properly and not just there-for-the-heck-of-it, can be very valuable in developing an appropriate personal or corporate brand, not to mention build a very large pool of potential clients. Great advertising! See me in the JASEzone here, on my blog here, on Twitter here, on LinkedIn here and on Facebook here to explain more of what I mean. I’m on those websites and my brand is very clean and professional. Gordy EyeCare is one of our clients we are beginning to do this for.

Two other service lines that we provide our clients are both technical. We have software engineers that do computer programming on applications such as books on CD rental, shipping, inventory, etc. Tape Rental Library in Charlottesville is one of our clients we do this for. We didn’t do their web design, we program the back end order taking and CD distribution system for them.

Then we provide web hosting, email hosting, tech support and computer repair under our JASEtech Support division. We have many, many clients that we do this for including Come2HamptonRoads.com, a real estate website for John Berger RE/MAX, Central Virginia ASA, DennyCorp, Covington Contracting and others.

What about you? What do you do? Do you have various environment-specific answers for your passions?