Twitter and Facebook give businesses the opportunity to interact with their customers. Using those channels as yet another way to talk at customers is wasting that opportunity. The best way for local businesses to use Twitter is to actually use Twitter. Log in, respond to messages, join the conversation, act like a real person and connect with your customers.

Polly.IM may be a useful tool if you're already engaged on Twitter, but if you rely on automated responses to drive your "interactive" marketing you're doing it wrong.