Lee Odden has a good post on just the kind of thing I'm trying to do for some of my clients - promote them without really focusing on SEO.  In the post, Lee mentions Eric Ward, who says:

"…The more powerful a person is to help your site get exposure the less likely they are to ever be reached by a mass distributed press release. In other words, who has time to weed through 15,000 press releases a day to find the two that actually say something?"

Makes sense to me …. if someone really is an influential - they probably too busy to handle tons of garbage press releases - they're most likely "laser focused" on what they do well.

Widgets also seem the way to go; I'm finding that it's not as easy as it sounds to just stick Widgets everywhere - it depends on the business and what it makes sense to "widgetize".