You need RP corps that can project power measured in more than mining yield.
You need to build a corp that focuses and excels at a specific area of the game
that also happens to roleplay a corp-defined alignment. Coreli Corp, I-RED, PYRE, TSF, Gradient, PIE, Veto, Moira, and others are all examples of this. Notice that most of what I listed at PvP centric, because they are memorable. You remember losing that ship to those groups, because not only did they kill you, but they rubbed it in with roleplay.
PvP gains you the most notoriety the fastest. Mining nets negligible notoriety, if any at all. Those are two extremes of the popularity spectrum for RP corps. When you are capable of projecting
military power whether it be in the form of small but brutally efficient hunter gangs like Pyre, or comparatively overwhelming fleets (including allies) dropped from a titan like I-RED - people notice that. When you sit in an asteroid belt quietly and buzz away at the rocks, people tend to forget.
The key to all of this however is building a group of players who place that gaming skill first, and the roleplay second. I-RED didn't buy a titan by roleplaying it. We didn't 'evict' several Syndicate alliances by yelling at them in the Summit or IGS. We did it by learning (slowly and painfully) how to PvP and building a large number of non-roleplayers to do it with. We also just happened to roleplay at the alliance level. Did you know very little RP goes on inside our alliance?
Yet despite our lack of actual roleplaying, people remember our big conflicts as hallmarks of good roleplay. It wasn't because we cared about that. It was because we wanted to blow your shit up, and
Dear Glorious Leader of the Corporate People's Democratic Republik Liberation I-RED, The Lord Grand Admiral Jonathan Ballsworth "Fucking" Revenent Sr. XVIII also happened to shitpost on the IGS a few times while succeeding triumphantly or failing miserably at a specific PvP campaign.
We posted while we pewed. That's really all it took. Acting like all our random ideas for shooting shit and taking stuff was because it was roleplay. I'd be willing to bet it's the same for the others too.
So stop looking for the roleplay fights. You won't find it. Just go shoot something, and pretend it's for the Fed.