Literally unbelievable: A Round-up of The Harbus April Fools articles that went viral

The Harbus April Fools articles go viral – including among many who didn’t quite realize it was a joke. Managing Editor Steve Hind explains.

[stag_dropcap font_size=”50px” style=”normal”]L[/stag_dropcap]ast week, The Harbus learned a valuable lesson: we should stop what we’ve been doing all year, and write fake articles instead.

On April one and two, a half dozen articles that we wrote for April Fools day drove more traffic to our website than we’d received in the previous three months (and our regular monthly traffic is pretty good!). Message received loud and clear: less content, more making fun of management consultants.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the fun, and sorry to those who were the butt of our jokes, namely: HBS, HBS students, The Harbus, consultants, rabbits, Dean Nohria, Dee Leopold…

We thought it might be fun to round up some of the best reactions. We know for a fact that our article about banning consultants reached far and wide – including the McKinsey intranet, which our analytics tells us referred quite a bit of traffic to the article.

My favorite site on the Internet is literallyunbelievable.org, which rounds up people’s reactions on Facebook to articles from The Onion that they don’t realize are fake. Here is our little contribution to the same cause (identities have been obscured to protect the gullible):