I was delighted that Simon Harris of Man Behaving Dadly and Southend News Network recently joined me on The Engaging Marketeer podcast. Simon is an absolute genius at social media and has managed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity, pretty much by fooling newspapers and right-wing imbeciles like Nigel Farage into believing fake news is real.
I spoke to Simon about how he’s raised such a huge following and so much money for charity, and what businesses can do to emulate his success online through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
As always, give the full podcast a listen for some great ideas and entertaining, laugh-out-loud stories, but these were some of the highlights:
Simon on his motivation behind setting up and running his pages
Darren: You run Man Behaving Dadly and Southend News Network – two hugely successful satire pages. What was your motivation in that?
Simon: Southern News Network was set up in 2015 and the motivation behind that was to literally have a dig at both the local news and local council. It started out as a very hyperlocal thing, a really highly focused geographical thing, but obviously the problem of doing that with a fake news/satire page is that it doesn’t take long for the inspiration to run out.
So, it very quickly just became a general satire site, and like all satire sites it started out leaning a bit to the left and it just moved further and further to the left because it’s a lot easier to satirise from a left-wing perspective than a right-wing perspective.
And there was plenty of growth until the point where from a financial perspective Facebook was making it very difficult for you to expand your reach. I talked to satire and fake news pages now and then and they were saying the same thing. In terms of advertising revenue on Facebook, ever since Brexit and Trump and all that, Facebook has really cracked down in terms of the algorithm on how people see content. I’ll occasionally put new content on Southend News Network but it’s just not worth my time unfortunately.
I’ve moved on to other things such Man Behaving Dadly, which I’d consider it half satirical, half political, half parenting, half product reviews – yeah, I know that’s four halves! But it’s just general p***-taking elements and satirical bits and pieces and putting them all together to create a parenting blog that’s not as “Instagrammy” as some others.
…on parenting and Man Behaving Dadly
Simon: There’s no such thing as a parenting expert. It irritates me when you get people proclaiming themselves to be parenting experts when they’re not. You’re an expert in your own kids sometimes, maybe, but that’s it!
Man Behaving Dadly is kind of like an anti-parenting blog for parents who don’t do parenting blogs, if that makes sense. It’s kind of like a mishmash of everything – again, it gets political an awful lot of the time but, you know, politics affects every single facet of every single little thing. People say, “I only followed you originally for parenting content”, but there’s only so many times you can say “I’ve got kids, it’s difficult, they poo everywhere, they’re sick everywhere, they keep me up at night”. Once you’ve done that to death then you have to move on to whatever’s in my head at any particular moment of the day.
…on Facebook algorithms
Darren: Facebook algorithms are something that every business owner has a problem with when they’re trying to promote their own businesses on Facebook. What’s your insight into that, and where do you think it’s going to go?
Simon: There’s absolutely no way of knowing. Covid was a great example of this because the emphasis went from tackling extreme-right content to tackling Covid misinformation, because there was a real danger at one point of Covid misinformation potentially killing people. You started reading this crazy stuff about 5G microchips in vaccines. If you believe that and you don’t get your vaccine, obviously the consequences of that would be absolutely catastrophic for people. When something like that happens, the algorithm will change at the drop of a hat and just when you think you may have figured out how it’s going, Facebook will change it.
The last thing that Facebook or Meta want is for people to know exactly how the algorithm works, and every time you get a so-called algorithm expert popping up saying “all you’ve got to do is create content that your audience will engage”, that’s great, but they might be engaging with it one week and the next week they’re not seeing it.
I was part of a project called Essex Coronavirus Action over the pandemic, and we’ve now transformed into more of a community space, but we were actually getting caught out by the algorithm ourselves for merely mentioning vaccines. At one point Facebook was just as keen to squash positive vaccine content they were to squash negative content. I suppose from Facebook’s perspective, what else could they do? There was so much of it flying around at one point, they had to take a very hard line. Obviously, that affected us, but hopefully it eradicated a lot of the absolute garbage that was flying around at the time as well.
…on building reach on Facebook
Darren: What advice would you have to businesses who are trying to build their reputation on Facebook and build their reach?
Be as uncorporate as possible! One of the successes of Essex Coronavirus Action was that we weren’t there to replace corporate communications from local government, we were working in association with Essex County Council, so we were there to reach the people who don’t always interact with that kind of organisation. So, we basically found a niche, for want of a better world – a gap in the market to get very serious Covid information out in a different way.
For instance, one of the most popular posts we did was when face masks were really starting to pick up. We asked Carole Baskin from Tiger King to record a video and she was wearing a face mask, and then she took it off. It blew up – hundreds of thousands of views, because she was one of the most famous women in the world at the time because that’s just when Tiger King was kicking off on Netflix, and she’s telling people to wear a mask.
Now, there’s no way in hell the NHS or local government official page would have done something like that, because obviously there’s risks to it. But it’s about finding a way of getting the message across in a very uncorporate way. There are some businesses that won’t work for, such as maybe financial services and insurance, but I’m finding at the moment that the companies that are doing well on Facebook are the ones that are thinking a little bit outside the box.
…on reaching 100,000 followers
Darren: We went to a Liverpool vs. Arsenal game together and you were telling me about how you got Man Behaving Dadly to 100,000 likes or followers on the page. Could you share that strategy with us?
Simon: Yeah, it was kind of gaming the algorithm. First of all, a lot of people who own Facebook pages are completely unaware they have the ability to invite people who like their post but don’t like their page- at least until you reach 100,000 likes or followers, whatever Facebook wants to call them this week. You click the “invite” button and whoever liked your post will get a little notification telling you that you’ve been invited to like this page.
The issue is that you’re only allowed to invite a certain number of people per day and then Facebook turns off the function for 24 hours, but if you build a team of admins and moderators – I think they only have to have moderator access and don’t even need to have full admin or editor access – you can sort of lean on them quickly to say “oh, do you mind just inviting everyone that you can?” I had about 20 people at one point, basically in a closed Facebook group, all doing this.
A couple of people have told me it’s a bad idea because you’re doing it in an artificial manner as opposed to just organically growing the page, but my argument is why would Facebook offer you the facility to do it? I think there is, or was, a Google Chrome Extension available that would do it for you, but Facebook is getting wise to that sort of thing.
So that’s how I got to 100,000, and after that you don’t get the facility anymore, so you have to actually rely on producing good content, which isn’t the worst thing in the world!
In a way it’s physically confronting people, saying “how can you not follow me yet?” It’s just a proper old-fashioned organic “beg”, if you like, but it really works.
Darren: It’s a call-to-action. So many people put Facebook ads out and they pay for the ads, but they don’t put a call-to-action in. Salespeople often find that when they lose a sale it’s because they haven’t asked for it
Simon: Yeah, and I’ve lost count recently of the number of times and I’ve seen an advert on Facebook for something like a fish and chip shop in Wigan because the people posting the advert just haven’t bothered looking at the geographical settings. I think a lot of it is down to agencies who are less scrupulous than yourselves just wanting to throw figures in front of a client and say “look how many views this had” even though a lot of those views are just completely irrelevant.
…on trolling Nigel Farage, The Sun and the far-right
Darren: Nigel Farage, you have been a thorn in his side for some time, haven’t you? What it is that you actually did that got him so angry and what were the results?
Simon: Like so much other stuff I do, I’m jumping on trends there and then when they happen. This was last August just at the height of the decent weather when the Channel was very calm so the migrant crossings from France were increasing further. The RNLI were getting an absolute pasting on social media and beyond because people were unhappy that they were using donations to assist illegal immigration, not realising that the RNLI have a duty to save all lives. With people saying they were going to stop donating, you could see that it was going to hit their bottom line.
I’m from the Southend area and it’s one of only two or three parts of the UK where the RNLI use a hovercraft, so I thought it might be funny to say they should get a rescue hovercraft and call it the Flying Farage, and then it can go out and rescue people at sea and it’ll turn up with a big Farage face plastered on it. There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of it actually happening because the RNLI have to be very careful about anything political or controversial, but it was funny as a concept.
So, I put the GoFundMe page up and, this is a very important point, I made it very clear the money is going direct to the RNLI to do what they want with.
All of a sudden £30,000 is becoming £50,000, then £80,000. I think at the moment it stands at just under £140,000 because every time Farage traps off I just reshare it!
Darren: You’ve also masterfully trolled The Sun newspaper on multiple occasions. There was the big one, wasn’t there? Tell us about that!
Simon: When my daughter Emma was 12 or 18 months old she had this little cow onesie, and I just took a photo of her to put some absolute crap up on Southern News Network about how an adorable toddler had been kicked out of vegan’s birthday party for wearing it. It was full of red herrings, like the baby was called Tanya Hyde and the crazy vegan mother was called Esmerelda Soyabeans, but it was online for about a week or something like when I got an email from someone at the picture desk at The Sun.
I was thinking that The Sun were doing some kind of feature about fake news websites or something like that, but then I noticed on The Sun’s website that they’ve actually taken it as a real story and they’ve quoted it and they’ve literally reprinted it chunk by chunk. It took them about three hours to realise that it wasn’t true and take it off!
Darren: You’ve fooled a lot of mostly right-wing people into sharing fake news. Is there a formula you have for creating something that’s going to work?
Simon: No, because I find the more ridiculous I’ve made it, the easier it’s been to get people to fall for it. For example, with Katie Hopkins when she was on LBC with her two million listeners or whatever it was at this time, I did a story just saying the M25 is going to be shut for a week because they’re going to have a cycling race and a jogging race around it. She sat there live in front of two million people reading out this story line by line getting more and more angry about, even though I’d “quoted” an MP called Mr. Jeremy Spunkton.
Britain First, when they when they were allowed on Facebook, shared a bit of content about the village High Easter in Essex having to change its name because it was offending non-Christians. The English Defence League shared something about hot cross buns having the cross taken off. It’s confirmation bias, but when that leads you to share stuff that’s blatantly fake, you really need to have a good hard look at yourself.
Darren: Then there was your Save The Sun campaign?
Simon: Yeah, one of the journalists from The Sun did a massive heartfelt plea on Twitter to keep buying The Sun because print sales were falling. So, I did a GoFundMe ‘Save The Sun’ campaign, but I put all these terms and conditions in it that became increasingly more ridiculous, knowing that people wouldn’t even get that far. All the money ended up going to uh food banks in Essex and organizations that hand out food, community fridges and stuff like that.
…on what to do if you miss the mark
Darren: When you’re creating content, whether it’s for yourself, for a client or for your business, it doesn’t always hit the mark, does it?
Simon: I’d say maybe 95% everything I do doesn’t hit the mark, which is why I don’t spend hours doing things. I just know that you could spend four hours writing something that absolutely dies, while a five-second tweet goes through the roof.
If you’re doing something that’s trending, you’ve got a much better chance. I did a review of Aldi’s new baby wipes a few weeks ago that I had a feeling it might be a winner because the sheer number of people already commenting to say, “this is one of the worst things to ever happen to me!” A bit melodramatic maybe but I see where they’re coming from, as I’ve got a 14-month-old and I’m literally pulling 15 wipes out at a time!
I think 3.4 million in the end people saw it on Facebook but on another day, with Facebook behaving a different way, I could have posted exactly the same thing and it would have got 20 likes. That can be quite hard to take when you’ve dedicated such a huge amount of time into making something, but if Facebook decides it’s not going to happen, just give up and move on.
Darren: I found that myself when I did the story for Chester Bugle about the Nokia 3310 found in a drawer after 20 years with 70% battery. When I put that on originally it had maybe 15-20 interactions. I was sure it was funnier than that, but I just waited a couple of months then put it on again, and it went viral and had over a million engagements.
Simon: One thing I tend to do is repeat my best bits of content. If I find my audience has grown over a two-year period, I’ll repeat something and it may do even better.
Darren: That’s recycling – it’s good for the environment!
A great, fun interview which I hope you’ll enjoy. If you did, check out Simon’s blog and Facebook page, and of course subscribe to The Engaging Marketeer podcast on the platform you prefer.