A SinglePlatform partnership eases Foodspotting into its next course

FoodSpotting, one of our favorite photo sharing apps, has set the table to take on yet another strategic partnership. Last year it teamed up with Zagat, and today with New York based SinglePlatform, a tech savvy service pulling restaurants into the digital era.

One year ago, in January 2010, SeamlessWeb entrepreneur Wiley Cerilli launched SinglePlatform to ease restaurants into the next course of internet marketing and social media. Restaurants provide SinglePlatform with their information like menus, photos, events and specials through an easy-to-use portal and SinglePlatform updates it across their hundreds of publishing partners including hotels, city guides, restaurant review sites and application developers.

Foodspotting also celebrated its one-year anniversary last month and boasts a total of 600,000 iPhone app users and the equivalent in website visits in the last month. It also has an Android app in beta and $3 million in Series A funding plus a $750,000 seed round.

So what’s for dinner?

The partnership is synergistic to say the least, and positions Foodspotting as a slightly more B2B company, a positive, and possibly lucrative stray from its previous consumer focused efforts. SinglePlatform enhances a Foodspotter’s experience with up to date content like open hours, menus, specials, events, official photos, what credit cards they take, etc., for all of its partner restaurants. Meanwhile Foodspotting draws more customers to SinglePlatform’s restaurants, who then have access to Foodspotting’s consumer collected content.

SinglePlatform restaurants will be able to monitor and manage their Foodspotting presence; similar to a “You’ve been tagged” notification on Facebook, restaurants will be able to monitor sentiment, both written and visual.

“Foodspotting is quickly becoming an important aspect of a restaurant’s digital presence. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Foodspotting, which is clearly one of the hottest sites and mobile applications out there,” says SinglePlatform’s Wiley Cerilli.

I asked Cerilli how much he loved Foodspotting, “When we moved offices downtown I no longer had my staple burger place. Normally, it would have taken me a while to ask around and find out where to go. Instead, Foodspotting suggested the Kobe Beef Burger at Zaitzeff, and I have been hooked ever since. Next up is my search for NY’s best wings!”

As more people turn to Foodspotting for local and geo-tagged food recommendations, it is fast becoming a great platform for restaurants to get on board with. The partnership helps Foodspotting rise above the noise to reach thousands of restaurants. Restaurants will be able to see which dishes customers are recommending, identify loyal customers and share these recommendations on their own pages.

And unlike a partnership with Yelp or Foursquare, what’s brilliant for businesses in this situation is that Foodspotting is a totally positive experience. It’s a place where people are sharing what they love, not what they hate.

“Since Foodspotting’s inception, we’ve wanted to give restaurants a way to take advantage of and increase their visibility on Foodspotting by letting them manage and add to the stream of sightings at their business,” says Alexa Andrzejewski, CEO and Cofounder of Foodspotting. “We’ve always wanted to give restaurants a way to upload their menus, choose their favorite photos of each dish or upload their own photos, and communicate with customers by posting daily specials and special offers. But we’ve also been increasingly concerned about forcing restaurants to go to yet another dashboard to manage all of this like Foursquare, Google, Yelp and Facebook, etc.”

Partnering with SinglePlatform allows Foodspotting to provide restaurants with a seamless way to manage their online presence without adding to the dozens of dashboards restaurants have to go to. And by adding Foodspotting to its growing list of online services, SinglePlatform is two courses ahead of the game.