Recently the TV critic of the St. Peters­burg Times asked for my thoughts about the migra­tion of celebri­ties to Twit­ter over the past few months. Will it inevitably dumb down the ser­vice? Bring it into the main­stream? Make us want to move on to the Next Big Thing?

Ash­ton Kutcher is clos­ing in on 2 mil­lion fol­low­ers, Brit­ney Spears is at 1.6 mil­lion, Oprah at 1.2 mil­lion, Shaq and Demi Moore at 1 mil­lion and Perez Hilton at 860 fol­low­ers for some reason.

The colum­nist, Eric Deg­gans, did a solid writeup (I’m quoted): Celebri­ties who Tweet: Tips to keep them from ruin­ing Twit­ter for us all.

Here’s the friendly advice I’m offer­ing to celebri­ties join­ing the Twit­ter­verse:

First, under­stand that you’re not lead­ing this parade. But we’re happy to have you in it. You have the advan­tage of hav­ing tens or hun­dreds of thou­sands of fans fol­low you on Twit­ter, even if you don’t know the dif­fer­ence between a tweet and a twit. But lis­ten, observe, fol­low back, par­tic­i­pate. It’s the golden rule of social media.

Sec­ond, how should you use your spe­cial pow­ers? To do good.

Ignore the new­bie approach of chron­i­cling the mun­dane aspects of your daily life. The Twit­ter ques­tion isn’t really: What are you doing right now? It’s: What are you doing that’s inter­est­ing? Or: what’s cool that you’ve hap­pened across?

Con­sider: Twit­ter has the poten­tial to be the great­est force for grass­roots char­i­ta­ble fundrais­ing in his­tory — the great­est do-gooder tool ever invented. Twes­t­i­val raised $250,000 for charity:water in a sin­gle day. Tweet­Poverty is giv­ing new power to micro-donations. Char­i­ty­Nav­i­ga­tor sup­ports wor­thy causes a few dol­lars at a time. The cou­ple behind the Global Hug tour just began an effort to raise $1 mil­lion for 50 char­i­ta­ble causes in 50 cities around the world, rais­ing $10 a pop from … well, from exactly the kind of folks who fol­low you.

Dig it, get behind it. Use your celebrity to save lives and help wor­thy causes. Don’t dumb down the cul­ture 140 char­ac­ters at a time.

Cross-posted to Socialbrite.org.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.