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The Snohomish chamber of commerce put on its first annual Snohomish wine Festival Saturday with unprecedented success. With almost 400 tickets sold including nearly 100 at the door, they found themselves running out of the collectors' wineglass quickly.

Pam Osborne the chamber director found herself scrambling to locate more wineglasses at the last minute; only 300 were produced with the logo. "We didn't anticipate having this large of a turnout" Pam said. "We were hoping to break even with this being the first event. We are extremely happy with the outcome of this year's wine Festival and all of the contributors that helped make it a success" she said.

The city of Snohomish economic development coordinator Debbie Emgie was critical in getting this event off the ground. She started with nothing more than an idea and permission to move forward in researching wineries and locations to hold the event. She wound up getting 18 wineries to participate and getting the Manor of Wine to provide a location for wine tastings and hors d'oeuvres.

Working together with local designer and chamber vice president Todd Elvig she was able to develop a logo and a website to direct people for information on this first annual wine festival.

The Manor of Wine was critical in the management of contributors and location organization.

But the real success in this marketing effort was the participants themselves, using twitter, Facebook, e-mail and the Internet, this event began to snowball and in hindsight looking at all the available data it is easy to understand how it became so big so quickly.

Web traffic to the Snohomish wine festival website was well over 1000 hits on Friday alone up from only 50 on the Friday the week before. The chamber of commerce website also showed a large increase in traffic this past week.

Besides the obvious traffic sources such as Google and shopsnohomish.com, there were high numbers coming from Facebook, twitter and all of the wineries involved too.

It is safe to say that this event will be going on every year and possibly twice a year with the success that it is shown in its inaugural debut.