With marketing service companies, internal marketing organizations, and individuals all trying to get noticed by exploiting new technology services and social media channels, it’s interesting to see how one person can create tremendous personal PR by being smart, creative, and knowledgeable of the symbiotic nature of hot technology and the media/bloggers. Such is the case with the virtually unknown musician known as R. Vaughn, formally toiling in obscurity in beautiful Hawaii. Yesterday, he was unknown; today, tens of thousands, if not more, have heard of him and at least one of his songs.

How did he succeed? He shot a low-budget music video (with the help of a friend, John Garcia, who may deserve joint or more credit) and managed to secure the lead in a CNN article on using the iPhone to create incredibly cheap videos and films. We don’t know how many hits his site has had — perhaps he will let us know in a follow up post that will be sure to be picked up by CNN and tech blogs — but I’m sure he’s had to up his monthly bandwidth quota.

What do we take from Ryan Gonzalez — the singer’s real name — and his PR triumph? That marketing/publicity success in this incredibly noisy and crowded digital world can be overcome in creative, intelligent ways. Keys to this specific effort included:

• Hitching onto a successful third-party product/service (Apple’s iPhone 4).
• Leveraging an existing mainstream site that actively recruits user input (cnn.com and its iReport initiative).
• Following up the PR blast with a site that can showcase the resulting PR (the R. Vaughn site).

What’s the next step?

• Letting the story virally infect pro-Apple sites and tech blogs, or actively promoting it if necessary (e.g., monitoring Mac Daily News and Engadget).
• Fueling the frenzy on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites.
• Following up with the inevitable calls and emails from marketing and music sites/blogs that want to document the story.

While this amazing promotional success may mark the height of the popularity of Mr. Gonalez’s music, his strategy to gain free, massive PR will live on … no doubt emulated by thousands of marketers and perhaps millions of individuals over the coming days and months. Most likely, he nor anyone else will be able to strike gold twice (e.g., shoot the first iPhone 5 video and get similar free press). Like the initial self-promotional success of musicians on MySpace and YouTube, once the word gets out on something that worked, every one will try and copy the strategy, and, as a result, the strategy won’t be effective again. Still, this story is a great example of how existing sites and smart thinking can be used to generate the PR that campaigns costing tens of thousands of dollars can’t match.