Introduction: Mass marketing techniques have dominated the marketing strategies implemented by companies worldwide. Media such as radio, television, newspapers, direct mail etc. were the ones carrying out the message to the large audience. The rapid growth of digital media opened new marketing possibilities for businesses, now the masses can be reached faster and more efficiently. The digital media capabilities can help businesses to spread viral messages to the mass market; like viruses. It is very powerful technique to be used to increase brand awareness of the organization.

Problem: As Berthon, Ewing and Napoli (2008) stated in their work that the band awareness literature has focused almost only on large multinational brands, where SMEs were not taken into consideration. Therefore, it is interesting in current study to address the lack of research focused on the use of viral marketing by SMEs to increase their brand awareness. Thus this thesis aims to fulfill this gap in the academic research.

Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to investigate how Small and Medium-size Enterprises use Viral Marketing and what impact it has on their brand awareness, moreover, thesis also aims to identify how SMEs create successful Viral Marketing campaign.

Method: The empirical data was collected through three interviewa with the CEOs and owners of organizations located in USA, Belgium and Sweden. There were two phone interviews with representatives of USA and Belgium companies and one face-to-face interview with the respondent from Swedish company.

Frame of Reference: Frame of references used in this thesis consists of theories regarding Viral Marketing, Branding and Brand Awareness. The authors have summarized the frame of reference by developing a model that integrates viral marketing and brand awareness. The model will help us out when formulating questions and when analyzing the empirical findings.

Conclusion: The authors have come to the conclusion that viral marketing does have an effect on brand awareness, but to different extend for different SMEs. In some SMEs the increased brand awareness is more clear and can be seen immediately, such as increased sales, increased frequency on the webpage and billions of viewers on their video campaign on Youtube, while others only got more friends on Facebook and small increase in sales then before the viral marketing campaign. This study points out that SMEs need to implement as many strategies as possible (slogan, jingle, symbols, slogan), but that is not enough. They also need to be unique, creative and clever when implementing a viral marketing campaign.

Introduction: A trend for organisations to change from single to multiple project management has been observed over the last couple of decades. Organizations shifted their focus from single project management towards the simultaneous management of the whole set of projects as one entity – project portfolio. New multi-project settings require a new management approach and practices to successfully manage a portfolio. A common practice in organizations is to evaluate projects after they had been carried out. At that point not much can be done and it is impossible to improve performance and prevent failure. Hence, problems that occur in projects’ implementation phase remain unsolved and even unidentified. Constant control, review and monitoring of projects’ performance in the implementation phase could lead to the problematic portfolio areas being spotted and timely management decisions being made in order to improve the overall portfolio performance.

Problem: How do organisations manage projects within a portfolio that perform poorly in the implementation phase?

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is: to describe to what extent and in what ways organizations control, review and monitor project performances in the implementation phase; to identify if organisations use any methods, tools or techniques in order to spot projects that perform poorly according to their expectations; and to discover what happens to the poorly performing projects in the implementation phase after they were identified.

Method: An electronic qualitative questionnaire had been constructed and sent out to the 46 sampled Swedish companies currently running project portfolios. 115 most suitable respondents had been chosen to answer the survey.

Frame of Reference: Theoretical framework is built on the literature within project portfolio management field, mostly concerning control, review and monitoring of projects of projects’ performance within their implementation phase; practices used to manage poorly performing projects as well as the value of organizational learning.

Conclusion: The research results show that even though majority of the studied organizations are aware and striving towards efficient project portfolio control, review and monitoring, a lot of space for improvement still remains. Results reveal that organizations are trying to keep track of projects’ performance within a portfolio, however, very few poorly performing are identified. Moreover, the management practices for underperforming projects are still very limited if not non-existent.