Visionary Blogging, as you may already know, is all about using blogs and social media with a careful sense of vision and focus.

Twitter is a rapidly emerging tool that practically screams to be used haphazardly.

Here’s a quick example of how to think about Twitter.

I am currently helping Heifer International with its Twitter account. Yesterday we came across this tweet (Twitter status update) by Ashton Kutcher, the world’s number one Twitter user in terms of followers with just over two million.

One of the things Heifer does on a daily basis is give goats and other animals to poor families around the world to help them achieve self-reliance. It also allows people to pay for those animals in someone’s else honor – so, you could get a birthday gift of a cow or a goat or some bees, but they wouldn’t actually go to you. They would go on your behalf to someone who really needed the gift.

Ashton’s tweet may not have been directed to Heifer. Nevertheless, it created an opportunity for Heifer and its fans to speak out in favor of animals as vicarious gifts.