Hi
I have heard this question many times from internet marketing and webmaster forums. And I want to stand with my beliefs that doing your online business promotion manually is better than using any automated software. Automated software are good, no doubt with that, but there are many reasons why I am not a big fan of automated software.
Reasons for the same
- They are not 100% accurate, if the site owner makes little modifications on his site forms the software will fail.
- If the site is down most of the automated software don't report it and there is no instant replacement of that site which is down
- Most of them you need to manually check if your site or articles are really submitted successfully
- Most of the automated software don't have the capabilities to by pass captcha which most authority sites require which means you still need to work manually
- Many automated software sometimes are not really fully automated, they are semi-automated and my team of operators always tell me that they can work much faster than those semi-automated softwares.
- There are some authority sites that easily detect if you're using an automated software, if they detect they will remove your account. If that happened it's a waste of time and effort from your side.
- And lastly, even though you're using an automated software you still need time to watch on the software because from time to time they fail or need your attention before they continue working.
So my friend, I would recommend you to do manual directory submissions instead of using automated softwares for getting the full benefit from this whitehat method.
Good luck with your site

thanks,
ankur