McKinsey - an Authority in old media and new

One of the threads I created was to ask for feedback on what people’s preferred content sources were and another comment addressed an issue Danielle raised about passive and active sources of information. I suggested that I like to think of information sources as either filtered or unfiltered, i.e. when we follow recognized leading authorities on Twitter and they post links for us to read, they ‘filter” the content, so we have some confidence that it’s worthwhile reading. On the other hand, we may search the web or randomly read from our aggregated collection of feeds, which would be “unfiltered” content.
It prompted me to think more about content sources and I noticed your thread as I was browsing the forums. The aspect of consulting firms that I find most interesting at a time when we are bombarded with an order of magnitude more content each year is that sources like McKinsey have been trusted for decades. Remove all the web and social layers and we would still trust them as we do today. Nothing has changed. Why is that? That is, of course, a rhetorical question because they “filter” our content for us, just as they “filter” the consultants they employ. Consultants have to meet certain standards, have certain skill-sets, qualifications, background, etc. Coupled with a history of results going back to 1926, all that gives us confidence that what they have to say is valuable, accurate, and trustworthy. That makes me wonder why we place so much confidence in newcomers who don’t have that pedigree. Which brings me to the real nugget that I’m trying to home in on. If we want to start offering advice today through our own blogs on business issues — as many thousands of bloggers do — how on earth can we compete with sources like McKinsey and build a reputation as an authority?