This is what works for me, but as mentioned above rankings will be fleeting when dealing with that type of competition. So you'll need to put in more effort to maintain your ranking. What is your budget to throw at this?
What I do is a coordinated and sustained strike designed to make Google think "something big" or newsworthy is going on with the site. It gives a nice, but temporary jump in rankings (e.g., after some time if you don't keep up the hype Google won't think anything newsworthy is going on anymore).
I come up with a plan for each of these and then execute them simultaneously (not one after the other, but a bit of each every day or every 2-3 days, over the course of a few weeks).
The first part is a series of PRs. I always stick videos in them, so I'll do those first, but I don't think it matters. What matters is that you use a good PR service that will get you good distribution for the backlinks. You can go the PRWeb route which will cost you, or find a cheaper alternative. There's a few I like that run $20-25 per release. You'll need to do 3 or 4. I space them out and drop them every 2-3 days. Once they show up on newspaper and TV station sites, backlink and bookmark those pages.
I'll also have a bunch of videos prepared and ready to drop. I'll also drop these every 2-3 days, and use some tools like Vagex to start throwing views etc. at them. I backlink these videos too and try to trigger universal search if it isn't already showing vids on the 1st SERP.
In conjunction with the above I run a social bookmarking campaign. You can use your own tools or find providers on Fiverr or in the BST section here. I usually find a couple of different providers and run them all at the same time. They won't all do their gigs at the same time, so you get a nice stream over the course of a week or so. Then I'll do it again.
In addition to all of the above, I used to use a guy who could do "Twitter bombs" and push out tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of tweets across a bunch of accounts, just a sustained repeated Tweeting (but spaced out). It would generate a massive realtime link pyramid to the target. He stopped awhile ago around when Google lost their Twitter API link and I haven't found a replacement yet. This used to be the ultimate secret weapon for me, because Google would go nuts over all the links and it generated a ton of link juice. I think it was a loophole in the way Google treated Twitter links and realtime search. I used this to great effect earlier this year. Unfortunately I tried to buy from the guy again a couple times and he just didn't respond.
The idea is to make it look like your site is trending socially. It has worked for me with several different sites.
While the above is providing covering fire I'll slide in some good EDU & GOV backlinks from a good provider.
As an anecdote, I remember the last time I did the above I had a good laugh because I was able to get Bing to treat my news as a bigger story than one of Lady Gaga's PR pieces for an entire weekend. It was worth a chuckle at the time
