Hot on the heels of my Social Tools Conference posts yesterday, at which two IBMers spoke, there is yet more evidence today of the influence of Big Blue’s social tools armoury.

Last week the BBC was announcing its deal with YouTube for YouTube to provide various BBC content on its platform.  Today the BBC announces that it is partnering with IBM to use IBM’s new video search techology, Marvel, to search across its vast content catalogue.  The idea is to move away from manual tagging and use much more powerful automated tagging to “to unlock huge latent value in [BBC’s] long tail of content”.

Last week also saw IBM announce that it was offering another of its social tools, corporate 'Jamming', to to help organisations keep in touch with large and dispersed workforces through online brainstorming sessions.