Find people who lead normal lifestyles outside their "influencer" gig. Girls with a lot of friends in real life. People that actually go places and have a good social network. That's usually the best type of person to recruit.
We recently initiated a sponsorship with a UFC fighter, officially announcing the partnership just after January 1st. Within a week following our PR launch, we had an impact on various ORM silos.
This is essentially a use case at Intellifluence. I've seen brands come in that wanted to hire bloggers to talk about them solely to drown out negative news that was ranking. It's a smart play.