Wild Letters

Jason Yarborough’s The Wild Letters is an online collection of interesting travel stories and playlists.

It’s been over a decade since Facebook and MySpace turned the world upside down. Social media, which started years before with AOL instant messenger and websites like Classmates, had finally come of age. Wall posts, messaging, and online interaction enamored and intrigued the world, making a huge amount of information, from the likes of national news to intimate details of your friends’ lives, easily accessible. As a witness to this social explosion, it was truly a sight to behold, a fun undertaking, and such a new and vibrant experience. Now, however, after ten years, the newness and intrigue has faded. Along with Facebook, popular sites and apps like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and a ton of others often clutter our lives with an overload of information, some of which is extremely valuable, but most, useless. It’s a mindfield of noise as users try to avoid a bombardment of selfies, political opinions, Candy Crush invites, copyright reposts, silly polls, memes, and so on.  “With all the noise that’s out there in social media, now you have to sort through it, and what better way to make your content stand out than to simply provide people with killer images and stories,” says Jason Yarborough of The Wild Letters.

Jason Yarborough, or Yarby as his friends have aptly nicknamed him, is one of Charlotte’s biggest social media gurus and one of the organizers of the popular Social Fresh conference. Yarborough has set out on a personal venture to get social media back to its meaningful glory days by sharing interesting, provocative stories. He is doing this through his growing brand, The Wild Letters, an intriguing concept that involves both his own personal story telling from his own adventures,  as well as the tales of his friends’ travels, and stories from other contributors within the social media realm and what he calls “influencers.” The site also incorporates a weekly contributed playlist for readers to enjoy during their own personal travels and experiences.

The story telling offered on the site is a random amalgamation of life lessons, unique people, beautiful travel destinations, and much more. Told eloquently and accompanied with images that are photojournalistic rather than staged and styled, the site and its stories are far from contrived like most out there. The authenticity abounds, like Yarby says on The Wild Letters, “Let’s escape the ordinary. Explore new experience. And share the stories that unravel before us. Create a moment that is forever brought to life. Live. Travel. Write.”

Recently partnering with friends at Mashable, one of the most popular sites in the world, Yarby’s future goals for the site are lofty. “What I do with social media is I tell stories and I always encourage people to tell short form stories. So the bigger picture with The Wild Letters is to tell stories on behalf of brands, for them to send us out on the road and do solid photojournalism and storytelling for them.” By telling meaningful and enjoyable stories through various influencers in interesting locales with beautiful photography, The Wild Letters can help the brands that it promotes separate themselves from all of the clutter.

Yarby is currently on the road, meeting interesting people, experiencing new things, sleeping on friends’ couches and Kerouacing around the country. You can check in on his new posts at TheWildLetters.com or follow him on social media at  @TheWildLetters.