All the answers seem to be from "early influencers" (Scoble most of all) advancing a view in which they're the gatekeepers. The problem with that is that you en

All the answers seem to be from "early influencers" (Scoble most of all) advancing a view in which they're the gatekeepers. The problem with that is that you end up building products for the particularly narrow niche that is Northern California Tech PR professionals. I can think of several huge successes that as far as I can tell, were huge long before the Tech PR community discovered them. Facebook - built an audience at a single colleges first. Groupon - never heard a thing about them from the PR community, until boom they were everywhere. Zynga - just pure evil marketing crap, but seemed to work spectacularly well. So I think that completely ignoring the "early influencer" crowd and doing plain old marketing (find a market, advertises, promote, etc) is more likely to result in huge success than is playing the SF/NYC/SxSW "influencer" game.