Decision
Content interviews shift from evergreen/standing questions to net-new, timely prompts each week: what happened this week, what meetings, what personal details, react to trends Hermes is surfacing. Evergreen questions produce evergreen (AI-sounding) answers. Blake Emal will report back after this week’s calls on how the shift is feeling.
Context
Blake Emal flagged that even when clients give voice notes on evergreen topics, the outputs still sound generic and AI-generated. Brentan Alexander was cited as a positive example: he gives strong opinions and real depth when handed a trend vs. a generic prompt. The “recommended batch” idea (Hermes feedback thread 821 in Megaphone) proposes surfacing a batch covering all content pillars at once, giving Blake more ideas to choose from.
Options considered
- Keep standing evergreen questions: ruled out - producing shallow, AI-sounding content.
- Pure trend-jacking: not ideal either; goal is to elicit industry knowledge through trends, not just trend commentary.
- Hybrid: ask about recent events/meetings/personal moments first, then use trends as a segue into deeper topic exploration. Selected.
Consequences
- Michael to update Hermes prompts tonight based on this discussion; feed this conversation in as context.
- Michael to review “recommended batch” feedback from Hermes feedback 821 and incorporate into prompt generation.
- Blake Emal to drop a note in the channel after this week’s content calls to flag whether the shift is working.
- Longer term: consider a different mode for clients like Ben Gusberg who only want to repurpose proven posts (no evergreen needed; just anecdotal humanizing details).
- Source: [Weekly] Megaphone Sync - Aug 24, 2026