Basically the plan was to use some of the existing social media sites (One in particular that was large in our target market) and locate the opinion leaders on

Basically the plan was to use some of the existing social media sites (One in particular that was large in our target market) and locate the opinion leaders on that site by analysing how many friends they had, etc. We then personally contacted around 100 people and tried to talk them into helping us getting off the ground. When they found out that a competitor was using their network to garner interest for a competing site they used every means at their disposal to shut us out. Understandable, I would probably have done the same thing.