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Articles by Monica
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Monica Ho shared thisBack-to-back events will test you...in the best way. Last week, my team and I pulled off SOCi ReImagine in Arizona, bringing customers together from Wednesday through Friday. On Saturday, I then showed up as board chair for the NAMI Central Texas walk. Nearly 700 people walked with us. I am happy to report that my board team exceeded our fundraising goal, and NAMI Central Texas as a whole topped our $200K walk target!!! Two very different events. Same lesson. Behind every great event is a team that cares about the outcome more than the credit. Planning, problem-solving at 6am, picking each other up when the energy dips. I’m lucky to work with and alongside people like that at SOCi.ai and at NAMI Central Texas. I’ll admit...I’m tired. But I wouldn’t have traded this past week for anything. When you surround yourself with talented, capable people, anything is possible. A special shout out to Emily Weldon, Madi Jorgensen, and Alicia Zhang my amazing events team at SOCi and Aubrey Wilkerson - NAMI CTX's Executive Director and Colleen Gallion our Walk Manager. Thank you to everyone who made both amazing events happen. And to everyone who supported NAMI Central Texas along the way, you made a real difference for our community. Here’s to what we build next!
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Monica Ho shared thisConsumer AI search is shifting from “ask it” to “task it.” That was the finding that surprised me most after three days at SOCi.ai ReImagine in Scottsdale. Our two keynote speakers, Andrew Davis and Lisa Landsman from Google, showed how consumer agents like Muse and Google’s Assistants are changing the way people search and shop. These AI assistants aren’t just helping consumers find answers anymore. They’re finishing the job...scheduling appointments, researching the best options and sale prices, and completing purchases. For multi-location brands, that changes the question. It’s no longer “will customers find us?” It’s “will an agent choose us?” But what I’ll remember most are the customer sessions. The insight and transparency our customers shared, including what’s working and what’s still hard, is why bringing this community together in person matters. No one has to figure out this new marketing landscape alone. And I couldn’t be prouder of my team. They pulled off another incredible customer event, and dare I say...this was our best one yet. Special thanks to Chad Jordan, CFE 👟 our amazing SOCi MC and to Mary Deitsch, Kaci McBride, MBA, Damian Rollison, Emily Weldon, Kelly Settino, Amanda Schulte, Madi Jorgensen, Alicia Zhang, Parker Severns, Chelsey Axline and every SOCi employee who helped make it happen. Grateful to every client and partner who joined us and I can’t wait to keep building the answers together at the next one.
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Monica Ho shared thisOnly 1 in 25 unhappy customers ever leaves a public review. The rest just don’t come back. And most brands find out a quarter later, in a number. For years, multi-location marketers have measured customer experience after the fact. Surveys go out, scores come back, and then... nothing. Not because teams don’t care. Because no team can personally follow up with every customer at every location. That’s the gap SOCi.ai's new Genius Reputation Agent Skills are built to close. Conversational Surveys, Review Generation, and Voice of Customer skills reach customers while the experience is still fresh, resolve issues in the moment, and invite happy customers to share their story. In a pilot with a multi-location brand, 1-star reviews dropped 45% and average Google ratings climbed from 3.88 to 4.38. Measurement was never the point. Recovery was. And as AI search leans more heavily on ratings, every recovered customer helps a location get found, too. Link in comments for more details.
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Monica Ho shared thisYou've heard how to win at SEO, AEO and GEO. But who's actually going to do the work? That's the part the industry keeps skipping. Every brand now has three discovery surfaces to optimize instead of one... traditional search, answer engines, and generative results. Multiply that by 500 locations and the strategy isn't the hard part anymore. The execution is. That's why I'm looking forward to sitting down with Kyle Sawai CMO of Liberty Tax, at SOCi ReImagine. Our session: Winning SEO, AEO & GEO with an Agentic Workforce Thursday, October 15 | 11:00–11:30 AM MST | Main Stage We're digging into how local visibility has evolved, the new ways customers actually find local businesses, and which tactics are genuinely moving the needle. Plus a live look at SOCi's Genius Local Search Agent doing the work in real time. Kyle has a real operator's view of what it takes to show up in thousands of local markets at once. If you're headed to ReImagine, I'd love to see you in the room.
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Monica Ho shared thisSecond year at #1. Seventh straight year in the top three. I've been here for all seven. And the local marketing playbook that earned the first ranking looks almost nothing like the one earning it today. Search changed. Social changed. AI rewrote what "scale" even means. Staying in the top three through all of that is a different accomplishment than getting there once. Jason Feifer explains how Entrepreneur builds the list in the video... it's rated by the franchisors themselves, which is exactly why it's the recognition we care most about.Monica Ho shared thisEntrepreneur Media has ranked SOCi #1 in Marketing Products & Services on its 2026 Top Franchise Suppliers list. That’s our second consecutive year at #1 and seventh straight year in the top three. 🏆 In this video, Entrepreneur Editor-in-Chief Jason Feifer explains how the rankings are determined. More than 1,000 franchisors rated the suppliers they use on quality, cost, and value. More than 75 franchise brands rated SOCi, giving us an average score of 4.57 out of 5. To every customer who rated us, thank you. This recognition belongs to you.SOCi Ranks #1 in Marketing on Entrepreneur’s 2026 Top Franchise Suppliers ListSOCi Ranks #1 in Marketing on Entrepreneur’s 2026 Top Franchise Suppliers List
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Monica Ho shared thisMost awards you apply for. This one you can't. Entrepreneur ranked SOCi #1 in Marketing Products & Services on the 2026 Top Franchise Suppliers list. Second year in a row at the top. Seven straight years in the top three. Franchise organizations are the hardest customers in local marketing. Hundreds or thousands of locations. Franchisees who vote with their own budgets. Corporate teams trying to hold a brand together across all of it. They don't rate a supplier highly because the demo was good. They rate it highly because it just works across every location, when they need it most. And we earned this ranking in the same quarter we crossed 400k+ deployed Genius Agents! Scale and satisfaction usually trade against each other. Holding both is the part I'm proudest about. Grateful to every franchisor who put us on this list. We're not planning to give the spot back. 💪 Link to the article by Entrepreneur and to our agentic release in the comments.
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Monica Ho shared thisLast night I couldn't sleep. So I did what a lot of people now do first...I asked ChatGPT. It gave me a few remedies, including magnesium bisglycinate. Interesting. But I wasn't sold. So I Googled it. Read up on why it works. Found a few brands I liked, then went straight to the reviews. Now I was sold. I went to buy online...and saw 5-7 day shipping. I wanted to start that night. So I searched "magnesium bisglycinate near me," found it in stock at a GNC that was still open, got in my car, and bought it. Four channels. One purchase. Under an hour. It wasn't until afterward that it hit me...I had just walked myself through the exact verification loop we documented in SOCi's latest research - The Local Discovery Index. AI started the journey. It didn't finish it. Search validated. Reviews convinced. Local availability converted. There's a loud narrative right now that AI search is replacing everything else. Our latest researcn and my own behavior says otherwise. Consumers still research purchases. They still read reviews. They still want to know if it's nearby, in stock, and open right now. For multi-location brands, that's the real takeaway. You don't win by optimizing for one channel. You win by being accurate, visible, and consistent at every stop in the loop...because you don't get to choose where your customer decides to verify you. We're still early in this shift. But the brands treating local discovery as a loop instead of a funnel are the ones getting chosen. Full research linked in the comments.
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Monica Ho shared thisBig congrats to Daniel Izen who just became SOCi's Chief Sales Officer! 🎉 Dan and I have spent years together building what we sometimes call "SMarketing"... the idea that sales and marketing aren't two functions that hand off a lead and hope for the best, but one connected engine. Some of our best strategic thinking has happened in the prep before a QBR, arguing about pipeline and walking out aligned. That kind of partnership only works with the right person on the other side of it. Congratulations, Dan. Here's to the next chapter... and to more SMarketing.
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Monica Ho shared thisThe gap between visibility and accuracy is the real story here. Consumers have already made up their minds to use AI Search for local discovery...the question now is whether the information it's serving them is trustworthy. That's exactly why we built the Local Discovery Index. Being recommended in AI answers and being represented correctly by AI are two different problems, and enterprise multi-location brands need to solve both. Thanks to Localogy for surfacing this data so clearly.Monica Ho shared this52% of consumers used AI to find a local business in the past 30 days. Last year, that number was just 9%. That's nearly a 6x increase in a year and a significant signal for anyone working in local search, media, marketing or SMB technology. But adoption is moving faster than trust. 67% of consumers also say they've received incorrect local business information from AI. Consumers aren't waiting for AI to become perfectly reliable before changing how they discover businesses. That's creating a new challenge for marketers. 💡 Being visible in AI matters, but so does being accurate everywhere consumers go to verify what AI tells them. Follow Localogy for more data and analysis on how AI is reshaping local discovery, search and the SMB Saas ecosystem. Source: SOCi.ai 2026 Local Discovery Index #StatOfTheWeek #AISearch #LocalDiscovery #LocalSearch #AIVisibility Damian Rollison , Monica Ho
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Monica Ho liked thisMonica Ho liked thisWhat separates restaurant brands opening new locations from those closing them? New research from SOCi.ai points to significant differences in local marketing visibility. Expanding restaurant chains appeared in approximately 20% of ChatGPT recommendations, compared with just 3% for contracting brands ... a difference of roughly 6–7 times. At Street Fight LIVE today, Kaci McBride, MBA McBride of SOCi explored these findings in “The Local Visibility Advantage: What Growing Restaurant Brands Do Differently.” Drawing on SOCi's Local Visibility Index research, her session examined how expanding and contracting restaurant brands compare across local search, reputation management, social engagement and AI recommendations. The findings offered MULO marketers a closer look at the practices associated with stronger local visibility and how those practices can inform growth strategies. #StreetFightLIVE #FranchiseMarketing #RestaurantMarketing #LocalSEO #AISearch
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Monica Ho liked thisMonica Ho liked thisOne of my biggest takeaways from SOCi Reimagine was how quickly search is evolving. Consumers are no longer searching with keywords alone. They're asking AI-powered search engines detailed questions and expecting personalized recommendations. What stood out most is that visibility is no longer defined by your website alone. Reviews, local listings, photos, social content, business information, and online reputation all help AI understand and recommend a business. As a Customer Success Manager at NACS, this reinforced many of the conversations we're having with retailers today. The brands that invest in local visibility, reputation management, and accurate digital experiences will be best positioned to earn trust, drive discovery, and ultimately win more customers. The future of search isn't just about being found. It's about being recommended. Thank you SOCi.ai for hosting a great event and sharing valuable insights on what's next for local search and AI. #SOCiReimagine #NACS #THRIVR #ConvenienceRetail #AI #LocalSEO
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Monica Ho liked thisAs I just shared in my SOCi.ai ReImagine deck, analytics is likely lumping a lot of LLM referrals as Direct. If you’re not benchmarking with a post-form or on-call question of “how’d you hear about us?” as Wil Reynolds has advised, you’re probably missing this part of your AI search visibility picture.Monica Ho liked thisFor 11 days in September, Gemini tagged its outbound links with utm_source=gemini. That gave us a rare look at how much Gemini traffic analytics normally misses. What we saw in AEM Operational Telemetry (real-user visits, 1,000+ domains, bots excluded): → Visits with a gemini(.)google(.)com referrer stayed flat. → Next to them, an equal number of tagged visits arrived with NO referrer, mostly on mobile (76%). They engaged like search visitors and landed on deep pages, so normally they're counted as "direct". → Measured: real Gemini clicks were 2.1× what the referrer shows. → Not every link was tagged: about a quarter of referred visits arrived without the tag. Applying the same gap, by device, to the visits with no referrer brings the estimate to ~2.5×. → On Sep 29 the tag stopped. Where Gemini's clicks land in a typical analytics setup: 40% attributed to Gemini ~41% in direct, recovered by the tag ~2% under Google or other referrers ~18% in direct, untagged (estimated, mostly mobile) How to use this if you work in SEO/GEO? Use 2× your Gemini referral sessions as a floor, and ~2.5× as a working estimate. Look for the rest in direct: mobile sessions landing on deep pages. Get your own ratio by comparing utm_source=gemini sessions with no referrer against gemini(.)google(.)com referrals for Sep 18–28. John Mueller, you mentioned on Reddit you'd love to see the referrer kept alongside the UTM tagging. Here's what that gap looks like at scale. Happy to share more detail with the team.
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
Publications
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Want to Beat the Average CMO Tenure? Remake Your Role.
MarketingProfs
See publicationThe CMO is one of the rockiest positions in the C-suite, according to the latest job-tenure figures.
Last year's average CMO tenure of 40 months was the lowest in a decade. Compare that number with the average CEO tenure of 85 months, and CMOs are often left wondering what to make of their jobs.
Much of the tenure problem stems from understanding how companies change as they scale.
Successful marketers recognize that their role should change just as quickly; CMOs get stuck thinking…The CMO is one of the rockiest positions in the C-suite, according to the latest job-tenure figures.
Last year's average CMO tenure of 40 months was the lowest in a decade. Compare that number with the average CEO tenure of 85 months, and CMOs are often left wondering what to make of their jobs.
Much of the tenure problem stems from understanding how companies change as they scale.
Successful marketers recognize that their role should change just as quickly; CMOs get stuck thinking that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow. Those who beat the average tenure understand how to remake their role to fit their company's needs. -
The Metaverse Is The Marketer’s Digital Playground: How Can They Play?
Forbes
See publicationThe time to explore metaverse marketing is now! I shared my thoughts on @Forbes about how the discussion around the metaverse heralds a new dimension to interaction online. Users no longer only read and write—they’re also immersed in the web and are becoming part of the experience.
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Beat Short CMO Tenure By Learning The Stages Of Leadership
Forbes
See publicationA CMO’s job is incredibly tough, and the role’s demands are showing in CMO tenures. According to SpencerStuart, the average CMO tenure in 2021 was down to 40 months—tied for 2020 as the shortest in over a decade. A lot feeds into this challenge of short tenure, but one area where marketers can do more is better understanding how their role evolves.
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CMO.com
http://www.cmo.com/content/cmo-com/home/articles/2013/6/5/_3_trends_that.html
Honors & Awards
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The Top Women Chief Marketing Officers for 2026
Women We Admire
Women We Admire is a professional membership organization and digital publication focused on recognizing and connecting top women leaders across the U.S. and Canada.
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2024 Top 50 Marketer: OnCon Icon Awards
OnCon
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2022 Women In Business Awards Nominee
Austin Business Journal
The 2022 Women in Business awards recognizes women in Central Texas who have forged their own path and developed their own leadership principles. These women have something to offer the next generation of women leaders. They have made a difference in their communities, blazed new trails and are leaving a mark on Central Texas business.
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2016 The 30 Most Powerful Women in Mobile Advertising - Ranked #21
Business Insider
Each year, Business Insider celebrates the best and the brightest women in the mobile advertising industry — a sector that has traditionally been dominated by men.
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2016 Industry Impact Award
Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)
The Mobile Marketing Associations's Impact Awards celebrates a collection of industry executives who have devoted their time, energy and expertise to furthering the mission of the MMA and the industry. 2016 Award Winner Details: http://www.mmaglobal.com/news/mma-2016-global-smartiestm-awards-honor-most-creative-innovative-and-effective-mobile-marketing
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2015 The 30 Most Powerful Women in Mobile Advertising - Ranked #24
Business Insider
Each year, Business Insider celebrates the best and the brightest women in the mobile advertising industry — a sector that has traditionally been dominated by men.
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2014 The Most Powerful Women in Mobile Advertising - Ranked #31
Business Insider
Each year, Business Insider celebrates the best and the brightest women in the mobile advertising industry — a sector that has traditionally been dominated by men.
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2014 Mobile Marketer's Mobile Women to Watch
Mobile Marketer
Organizations
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CMO Club
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- PresentThe most innovative and engaged community of CMOs, committed to helping each other solve our biggest challenges in a behind closed doors, candid, and trustworthy environment
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Young Women's Alliance
Mentor
-YWA Connect was established to connect women who are established community leaders and professionals with YWA Members to help create the next generation of female leaders. Through this program, both Mentors and Mentees are given the resources needed to grow professionally and personally.
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AUSAM
Board Member
-AUSAM is a thought leadership organization made up of those in the Digital Marketing and Media fields. We create professional and educational opportunities to advance Digital Marketing and Media in Austin, TX.
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Mobile Marketing Association
Executive Committee - North American Board
-The MMA North American Executive Committee oversees the strategic vision for the region. These efforts include advocacy; standards, creative and media best practices development; research; education and innovation. In addition to overseeing and directing the North American regional board, the North American Executive Committee represents the region on the MMA Global Board of Directors.
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Women in Wireless
Executive Women Committee Member
-Women in Wireless is a non-profit that empowers and develops female leaders in mobile and digital media. The organization seeks to increase the number of women in executive and C-level positions at start-up companies and established companies.
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Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)
Board Member - North America
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