Hi RightInTwo,
Check out all of the "brand" web 2.0 websites out there.
http://knowem.com/websites/all/ (a good number of these still tend to rank pretty well in these types of situations and some don't need many/any links at all to stick, but you need hyper-relevant unique content)
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/393145-new-web2-0-blog-list-over-100-updated.html (don't know if you already checked it out or not, for others that haven't it is a useful list)
Google loves diversity within their search results. So in addition to building links to neutral pages already listed in the top 25 and creating/backlinking the popular web 2.0 websites, you can look into stuff like producing simple videos for the popular video-sharing websites, use professional and relevant images for the popular image-sharing websites, create and distribute presentations that will rank for your relevant keywords, etc. Press releases dripped at a consistent rate can work out well too...
Content costs can get very high so be sure to leverage each piece of unique content that you have, for example turn your articles into videos etc. Check out the following guide for a lot of useful online reputation management tactics that can still work in 2012. There is a lot you can do and a lot of resources/website types/file types you can leverage. Videos seem to be ranking really well these days, and not just YouTube, but Vimeo etc. You can try using classified sites like Craigslist and QnA sites like Yahoo Answers etc to get kw-rich positive/neutral content ranking on the first pages too.
Look at some of the techniques in "Step 3" of the guide specifically:
http://www.reputationmanagementadvice.com/a-basic-guide-to-online-reputation-management
Also, I mentioned this in other related threads on BHW. In specific situations, Google WILL actually remove search results for you, similar stuff discussed here:
http://www.reputationmanagementadvice.com/what-to-do-when-your-personal-information-becomes-publicly-available-online
For future reference, in situations where you DO get certain pages removed through various means, always ensure that the cached page is removed from Google as well:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663691