To need influencers you need people who can be influenced, the way Steemit is working today where nearly every up vote is made by a bot or by some guild and where all upvotes are already pre assigned to the same people regardless of the quality of their articles you are not going to have many people to influence. I think first you have to work on having people curate manually, up vote only what they think has quality or else this platform will just become a huge social bot media.