Like any other day, Maria Pergolino was going through her morning routine on Monday, September 21. As part of her job, Pergolino, senior manager of inbound marketing at Marketo, manages Marketo’s handle on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. She’s also working on the strategic level to integrate social media into the company’s marketing automation solution.

So it wasn’t a surprise that she was logging into Twitter, checking Facebook. What did come as a surprise, however, was the sudden appearance of a tweet that linked to a blog proclaiming that her company was undergoing a security breach. Dealing with a situation like this is cumbersome any day, but for Marketo, that Monday was also the start of its annual User Summit.

“I immediately walked to an executive team meeting to find out [what was going on],” Pergolino says. “We brought in the engineers, they looked at the security and customer data and found no breach — the post was incorrect.” The fact that it happened on the first day of the company’s conference? “It was deliberate that it happened that way,” she says.

The blog post didn’t have a timestamp, but Pergolino was able to catch the tweets minutes after they were published. Resisting the instinct to fight social media with social media, Marketo set out to provide a statement for its customer service and sales teams. Pergolino argues that in this case, “what was happening with our brand was not important. You have to put aside your brand and make sure the number one priority is your customers,” she says. Luckily, everything was set in motion before the first calls of concern began rolling in.

Then began the investigation. The fraudulent blog was set up under the name Red Condor, an email security vendor. The tweet linking to the blog told readers to keep a look out for their Google Alerts, suggesting that that was how they, too, found out about the post. That was Pergolino’s first clue the that blog was fake: “I was able to look at the site, put it into Google, and saw that Google hadn’t captured the information, so I knew…that it was a brand new blog.” Pergolino sent an email to the director of marketing at Red Condor explaining the situation. She then verified that in fact, the security company had not created the blog, and both companies requested that WordPress remove the blog entirely.

The masqueraders didn’t stop there. To enhance validity, the blog post featured screenshots of what Marketo was able to identify as a current customer—one that had left the vendor Marketo suspects was behind this ordeal to become a Marketo customer. In speaking to the customer, however, Marketo discovered that while that is what had happened, “the customer said they did not intend for them to be used in that way.”

So why didn’t Marketo tweet out in defense? “We didn’t want to give it extra validity,” Pergolino says. “Our approach was instead to make sure we put out information about our security and to address people one-on-one about what happened…when you just read two lines of something, [readers] are not sure what is right.”

For B2B companies, social media is still relatively new. Mentions may not happen often, but when they do, they may pack more of a punch compared to the thousands of tweets B2C companies have to sort through on any given day.

Once the damage was done, Marketo decided to avoid the social media means of information dissemination, but doesn’t deny the valuable role the channel played in helping it to repair the damage. “[B2B companies] have to pay very close attention to social media,” Pergolino says. “It really comes down to being responsible for your brand and monitoring what’s happening — even if there aren’t a lot of brand mentions — then finding the best course to deal with it.”