Dyan Machan has an insightful piece in Smart Money about how Lady Gaga used her personal story, empathy and social media to become the most Googled person of all time (and earn $100 million this year). Her article is based on the business school case study, “Lady Gaga, Born This Way?,”  coauthored by Martin Kupp, program director of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.

My favorite takeaway is from the “If the Rules Don’t Work, ReWrite Them” section:

“Germanotta knew talent wasn’t enough to draw attention in a crowded music landscape…. perhaps most important, she worked at first without help from a very skeptical recording-industry establishment. One label turned her down; another dropped her, reportedly after one of its executives made a cutting-his-throat gesture while listening to one of her tracks. So Gaga fed her music and promotional info directly to her fans, via social media. An early-adopting Twitter user, she communicated with her followers an average of five times a day and used the service to announce the release dates of her new albums. Kupp says it’s all an example of how upstarts need to ignore the standards set by large, risk-averse corporations: “If you don’t break the rules, you won’t make it,” he declares.”

Another example of how social media has eliminated the need for many of the middle-men once necessary to launch and build a career, business and brand.