Is there one event that stands out in your mind that began Yahoo’s fall? Please share your thoughts.

Sage Lewis of SageRock Digital Marketing Agency spoke to WebProNews after he wrote a compelling post about the death of Yahoo. He told us that, while he doesn’t blame the demise on a single event, the incident involving the Chinese reporter that was sentenced to prison after Yahoo turned over his email messages to the Chinese government disturbed him.

When then-CEO Jerry Yang testified at the congressional hearings shortly after the China ordeal, Lewis said, at that point, he realized that Yahoo was “closed-down, vision-less, and cowardly.”

As mentioned earlier, Yahoo has made extensive cuts in its talent pool and properties in order to focus on its “core strengths.” While most businesses can identify with this way of thinking, the circumstances surrounding Yahoo seem to be different. According to Lewis, successful Internet companies take risks, innovate, and even though they fail sometimes, they aren’t afraid to try.

“You don’t get a sense that they’re [Yahoo] trying… as you see them make moves, or make changes, they seem tepid to me. They seem minor and, once again, conservative,” he said.

He further said that he is surprised that Flickr and Yahoo Site Explorer still exist. On that note, Yahoo also announced that its search marketing blog would be closing at the end of this month.

Although the finger of blame can be pointed in many directions, Lewis credits part of the problem to the internal culture of Yahoo. It still has a lot of intelligent people, but it doesn’t appear to have the same ambition that its rivals have.

“Nobody is feeling great about Yahoo except maybe the top executives and some lawyers,” he pointed out.

Even with Microsoft as the underdog in search, Lewis said you could tell that it is excited and motivated about its projects. Yahoo, on the contrary, doesn’t make this same impression on people.

In order for the company to turn around, he said, “There would have to be this complete shift from the top of change and optimism and hope and love… love of what they do.”

As for current CEO Carol Bartz, he believes she will be gone within the next year to 18 months.

One of Lewis’s first examples involved Digg and StumbleUpon.  While it’s true that being featured on those sites will raise your profile (or that of your company), Lewis pondered what sort of damage any negative comments could cause.  All those eyes . . .

And all that traffic to your site.  The Sage Rock founder labeled these things as “vague benefits,” and said that you should always question the identity of your visitors.  Businesses should also try to determine the visitors’ cost per acquisition, and consider if they will actually buy.

Yet you needn’t be a psychic to determine these things.  Lewis noted that stats are getting better – services can provide bar graphs or pie charts (whatever’s your pleasure) to display what items were clicked on and what feed readers people use.  He also mentioned FeedBurner, “the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds,” by name.

Other sites that you should embrace, according to Lewis, include Flickr and Google Video.  This second service, in particular, makes some great statistics available (such as downloads and page views).  And, hey, it’s Google – you can’t go too wrong there.

Another Mountain View product to get a plug was Google Webmaster, which shows you both internal and external links.  The description on Google Webmaster’s home page is succinct enough to repeat here: “Welcome to your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites.”

The Sage Rock founder concluded his talk by looking to the future – the future of social media optimization (SMO) metrics.  While noting that this wasn’t invented for business (and so the available stats are rather poor), Lewis endorses the idea of aggregating SMO analytics tool to pull data.  Experience will show us, he noted, what is valuable to measure.